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BONUS CHAPTER ANTHROPOLOGY OF AMERICAN RELIGION

America’s Silicon Valley might seem like the least likely place in the country to search for

religion: liberal demographics and secularization theory would predict that upwardly mobile,

technology-oriented people such as those concentrated in northern California are among the least

religious Americans. That may indeed be true, or it may be more accurate to say that the religion

of Silicon Valley’s computer professionals is unconventional and adapted to their middle class

lifestyle and their technological worldview. Accordingly, Stef Aupers finds an assortment of

“technopagans” among these modern skilled computer programmers, who “conceive of the act of

programming as magical” (2009: 153). Noting first that “pagans are more active on the Internet

than other religious groups” (156), Aupers follows Erik Davis’ (1995) definition of

technopaganism as a “small but vital subculture of digital savants who keep one foot in the

emerging technosphere and one foot in the wild and wooly world of Paganism…. They are

Dionysian nature worshippers who embrace the Apollonian artifice of logical machines.” The

magic of educated computer professionals, though, is not “magic as a ritual” but rather “the

mystery of intangible, opaque, digital technology,” in which “the personal computer is sometimes

the object of mystical speculations” (Aupers 2009: 161). Ironically but profoundly, computer

technology is both vanishingly small and vanishingly large: it embraces the wonders of

microprocessors and whirling electrons as well as the globe-spanning scope of the World Wide

Web. More, “the Internet can no longer be understood in a mechanical way since it ‘grows’ and

‘behaves’ in an organic fashion”; indeed, “the Internet actualizes an ancient holistic claim about

the universe: like in the cosmos as a whole, everything and everyone is ‘connected’” (161). In a

word, technopagans experience digital technology as a kind of animism: computers and related

technologies seem to have a life of their own, beyond the total understanding or control of

humans. Because computers and the Internet transcend humans although they are human

creations, technopagans see a kind of unpredictability, even agency, in technical systems, and this

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unpredictability “in turn, raises feelings of ‘awe’—a mixture of fascination, delight and

excitement on the one hand and fearfulness on the other hand” (165)—the sort of experience that

Rudolf Otto associated with religion and “the holy.”

Two hundred years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville, who could rightly be regarded as the first

fieldworker on American society, described a people who were optimistic, practical, materialistic,

egalitarian in spirit, energetic, a little unsophisticated, and unusually religious. In fact, he wrote,

“The religious atmosphere of the country was the first thing that struck me on arrival in the

United States” (1969: 295). He was surprised not only by the general religiosity of the society but

at the diversity of religion, the “innumerable multitude of sects” (290). All of these sects, he

thought, shared the same basic worldview and morality, including a commitment to freedom and

equality; the original settlers, he opined, “brought to the New World a Christianity which I can

only describe as democratic and republican” (288). He also noted the propensity for religious

extremism, especially in the sparsely-settled western frontier: “Here and there throughout

American society you meet men filled with an enthusiastic, almost fierce, spirituality such as

cannot be found in Europe. From time to time strange sects arise which strive to open

extraordinary roads to eternal happiness. Forms of religious madness are very common there”

(574).

The diversity of American religion has grown dramatically since those early days, but the

character of American religion has been remarkably constant. In this chapter, we will explore the

anthropological contribution to the study of religion in the United States. Admittedly,

anthropology has largely ceded the territory of American religion (and American society in

general) to sociologists, historians, and religious studies scholars, who produced such works as

Sydney Ahlstrom’s (1975) A Religious History of the American People, Robert Ellwood’s (1973)

Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America, Edwin Gaustad’s (1999) Church and State in

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America, Nathan Hatch’s (1989) The Democratization of American Christianity, Philip Jenkins’

(2000) Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History, Martin Marty’s

(1984) Pilgrims in Their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in America, and most recently Robert

Putnam, David Campbell, and Shaylyn Garrett’s (2010) magisterial American Grace: How

Religion Divides and Unites Us. Even geographers like Justin Wilford (2012) and theater scholars

like John Fletcher (2013) have applied their unique tools and perspectives to the subject. Yet,

anthropology is certainly not incapable of investigating American religion, and anthropologists

have increasingly risen to the task in recent years. In so doing, anthropology has improved its

concepts and methods while it has discovered the richness of the American religious scene for

understanding cultural processes of migration, change and innovation, syncretism, secularization

and desecularization, vernacularization, and more. Like researchers prior to and contemporary

with us, anthropologists have marveled at the creativity of Americans in the realm of religion, and

we have insisted more than most that American religion extends far beyond the familiar Christian

sects and beyond Christianity at all.

AMERICAN RELIGION: DIVERSITY AND HISTORY

If ever there was a “religious field” populated by all sorts of distinct yet partially integrated

religions, it is U.S. society. The vast majority of Americans subscribe to some version of

Christianity, but the variations are staggering. According to the latest American Religious

Identification Survey (Kosmin and Keysar 2009), Catholicism continues to rank as the single

largest “church,” with nearly one-quarter of the population in its fold. Protestantism is not and

never has been a single unified church but rather a type of Christianity; loosely defined so as to

include its diverse sects and denominations, it claims about fifty percent of Americans. Thus, the

remaining quarter identify themselves as following “other religions” or “no religions.”

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Table 12.1 Religious Identification in the U.S.—Christian Groups (Source: American

Religious Identification Survey 2008)

1990 2001 2008 Percentage 2008

Total US adult population 175,440,000 207,980,000 228,182,000

Christian groups 76.0

Catholic 46,004,000 50,873,000 57,199,000 25.1

Baptist 33,964,000 33,830,000 36,148,000 15.8

Protestant (unspecified) 17,214,000 4,647,000 5,187,000 2.3

Methodist/Wesleyan 14,174,000 14,140,000 11,366,000 5.0

Lutheran 9,110,000 9,580,000 8,674,000 3.8

Christian (unspecified) 8,073,000 14,190,000 16,834,000 7.4

Presbyterian 4,985,000 5,596,000 4,723,000 2.1

Pentecostal (unspecified) 3,116,000 4,407,000 5,416,000 2.4

Episcopal./Anglican 3,042,000 3,451,000 2,405,000 1.1

Mormon 2,487,000 2,697,000 3,158,000 1.4

Churches of Christ 1,769,000 2,593,000 1,921,000 0.8

Jehovah’s Witness 1,381,000 1,331,000 1,914,000 0.8

Seventh-Day Adventist 668,000 724,000 938,000 0.4

Assemblies of God 617,000 1,105,000 810,000 0.4

Church of God 590,000 943,000 663,000 0.3

Nondenominational 195,000 2,489,000 8,032,000 3.5

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Table 12.2 Religious Identification in the U.S.—Non-Christian Groups (Source: American

Religious Identification Survey 2008)

Other Religions 1990 2001 2008 Percentage 2008

Jewish 3,137,000 2,837,000 2,680,000 1.2

Muslim 527,000 1,104,000 1,349,000 0.6

Buddhist 404,000 1,082,000 1,189,000 0.5

Unitarian/Universalist 502,000 629,000 n/a n/a

Hindu 227,000 766,000 n/a n/a

Native American 47,000 103,000 n/a n/a

Scientologist 45,000 55,000 n/a n/a

Baha’i 28,000 84,000 n/a n/a

Taoist 23,000 40,000 n/a n/a

New Age 20,000 68,000 n/a n/a

Eckankar 18,000 26,000 n/a n/a

Rastafarian 14,000 11,000 n/a n/a

Sikh 13,000 57,000 n/a n/a

Wiccan 8,000 134,000 n/a n/a

Deity 6,000 49,000 n/a n/a

Druid n/a 33,000 n/a n/a

Santeria n/a 22,000 n/a n/a

Pagan n/a 140,000 n/a n/a

Spiritualist n/a 116,000 n/a n/a

Total New Religions and

Other Religions

1,296,000 1,770,000 2,804,000 1.2

Atheist n/a 902,000 1,621,000 0.7

Agnostic 1,186,000 991,000 1,985,000 0.9

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Total No Religion 14,331,000 29,481,000 34,169,000 15.0

Refused 4, 031,000 11,246,000 11,815,000 5.2

In 2008, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life conducted its own U.S. Religious Landscape

Survey, uncovering basically similar but slightly variant results, as shown in Table 12.3.

Table 12.3 Major American Religious Traditions, as Percentage of Adult U.S. Population

(Source: U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, 2008)

Religious Tradition Percentage of Adult

Population

Total Christian 78.4

Total Protestant 51.3

Catholic 23.9

Mormon 1.7

Jehovah’s Witness 0.7

Eastern Orthodox 0.6

Total Other Religions 4.7

Jewish 1.7

Buddhist 0.7

Hindu 0.4

Muslim 0.6

Unitarians and other

liberal faiths

0.7

Unaffiliated 16.1

Atheist 1.6

Agnostic 2.4

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Nothing in particular 12.1

Don’t Know/Refused 0.8

Within those broad categories, the Religious Landscape Survey counted spectacular diversity,

with five subcategories of Judaism, five of Buddhism, four of Eastern Orthodoxy, four of Islam,

twenty-eight of “mainline Protestantism,” and more than fifty of evangelical Protestantism.

A few interesting trends emerge from this research. First, many of the mainstream denominations

have grown little if at all in nearly two decade under review. The fastest-growing religions

relative to their starting size are the non-mainstream Christian and the non-Christian groups,

including Muslims and Buddhists as well as those identifying with no religion; Hindus tripled

between 1990 and 2001, and Wiccans grew almost seventeen-fold.

In terms of Christian denominations, the greatest growth occurred outside the main “churches”

with which Americans are most familiar. For instance, the increase in the number of people

identifying as “Christian (unspecified)” was around seventy-five percent, and

“Nondenominational” exploded from less than two hundred thousand in 1990 to over eight

million in 2008. Specific sects like Jehovah’s Witness and Seventh-Day Adventism enjoyed

strong gains.

Numerous other organizations conduct periodic or ongoing research on American religion. The

Barna Group (www.barna.org), for instance, revealed many interesting things about

contemporary American religion, including how very complex and even inconsistent it is. Some

of the findings include:

79% of Americans believe in an immortal soul (82% of women, 72% of men).

59% reject the reality in Satan, taking him or it to be merely symbolic of evil.

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Only half of Christians believe that Jesus was perfectly sinless.

44% believe that the Bible, the Qur’an, the Book of Mormon, etc. are all expressions of the

same spiritual truths. However, 84% of “evangelical” Christians disagree.

Adults under 35 years of age are the least likely to have a “biblical perspective” on life

Religious teachings actually minimally affect people’s moral choices. More important

influences on people’s behavior are the practical outcomes they expect, their desire to avoid

conflict, and their parents.

The overwhelming majority of adults and youths do not believe in absolute moral truth. Two-

thirds of adults and 80% of youths think that morality is “relative,” even though they are

Christians and believe in the accuracy of the Bible. Interestingly, whites endorse relativism

by 60% while non-whites hold it by 74%. “Born-again” Christians were the most likely to

believe in absolute morality.

Other fascinating and maybe surprising results were:

Born-again Christians and non-Christians have the same divorce rate.

Half of all home-schooling parents are born-again Christians.

40% of senior pastors do not have a seminary degree (supporting our contention about the

“populism” of religion, even religious leadership).

After a short surge following the 9/11 attacks, all indicators of American religiosity returned

to pre-attack levels within two months, i.e. there was no long-term religious impact.

Less than 1% of Hispanics belong to a mainstream Protestant sect.

The religious beliefs of church members who started attending as children are no different

from those who did not start attending as children, i.e. childhood “religious education” seems

to have no distinguishing effect.

Religion, American-Style

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It is understandably difficult, if not impossible, to say anything simple and categorical about

“American religion.” Indeed, anthropologists are quick to point out that we can only speak

sensibly about American religions. Even so, anthropologists and other observers have identified

recurrent themes and patterns across religions, which we might justifiably call an American style

of religion which is, as Mary Douglas argued about religion in general, an illustration of the

consonance between a society and its religions—of the integration of religion into the overall

ethos of a society and of the interpenetration of religious and non-religious elements of a culture.

Among the features that have been suggested for this American style of religion are:

1. Religious searching and revivalism. Martin Marty, one of the leading scholars of American

religious history, has said that Americans are on a “constant pilgrimage,” re-enacting

generation after generation that formative event or paradigmatic act in which believers made

their pilgrimage to a new home. Americans, as de Tocqueville commented long ago, are a

restless people, always on the move, always on the lookout, including in their religious

identity. This has taken the particular form of cyclical “revivals,” in which periods of relative

disinterest or low energy in religion are followed by periods of “re-awakening” of religious

fervor. Along with this has come the uniquely American expression of the literal “tent

revival,” in which preachers—often ones outside the mainstream or “official” churches—

bring religion to the people and attempt to stir up vehemence of believe as well as a more

“moral” or Christian way of life.

2. Anti-authoritarianism or a “populist” or “democratic” style. Americans, partly as a function

of the origin of the country and partly as a function of their egalitarian values, do not like

anyone telling them what to do, even in their religion. So American religion has repeatedly

resisted the “learned men” and formal academic theologians. Instead, religion has tended to

“go to the people” just as it “comes from the people.” Non-ordained, often untrained

preachers have claimed as much right to—and often had more effect on—the religiosity of

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the populace than any university or high-church official. The latter have often bemoaned the

coarse and untutored teachings of these enthusiasts, but they have also envied their successes.

This “popular religion” has tended to resonate with the interests and even the personalities of

the masses, the rural folk, and the dispossessed.

3. Emotionalism and individualism. Americans are individualists. They also veer toward being

emotionalists. Far back in the country’s history, and recurrently throughout that history, they

have been given to bursts of “enthusiasm” and personal/emotional experiences and

expressions of religion. Religion is not just something for Americans to think or even to do

but to feel. In fact, the elevation of feeling over thinking or doing is a persistent message.

This is partly about the associated individualism, that Americans should not just go along

with religion because everyone else does but should really take it into their individual and

private heart. However, it also has to do with a pervasive anti-intellectualism and a “down

home” simplicity, a “leveling,” of religion, like everything else in the American way of life.

This is why we see repeated appeals to and outbursts of activities like “possessions of the

spirit,” speaking in tongues, “holy rolling,” and such overt forms of religiosity.

4. Separation of church and state. While not all Americans have upheld this principle, and not

all interpret it identically, there has at least been a tendency to favor religious freedom and the

non-interference of government in religion. Formal “establishment” of religion by the

government has been frowned up and prohibited. Many early American politicians and

religious leaders alike recognized the benefit of this separation, so that churches could go

about their business without government burdens and government could go about its business

without religious burdens. People have been willing to accept a certain amount of

secularization of society in order to preserve the purity and freedom-of-action of their

religions. This compromise is often credited with the success and diversity of religion,

ironically perhaps, since, because there was no official religion and religions were free—and

required—to compete for followers in the “religious marketplace,” religion could be as lively

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and entrepreneurial as any business. In fact, some have suggested that American religion is a

business of sorts.

5. Moralism. Americans tend to have a high opinion of themselves and their place in the world,

which is commonly dubbed “American exceptionalism.” While extreme elements like the

Christian Identity movement regard (white) Americans as the chosen people and descendants

of the true Israel, many mainstream Americans consider their country and society to be

particularly virtuous and moral. They can see themselves as the guarantors of all that is good

in the world, a “shining city on the hill,” facing an “axis of evil” outside their borders. In the

late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, “morality”—often conceived in rather frankly

religious terms (and focusing heavily on sexual issues like homosexuality, abortion, pre-

marital sex, contraception, pornography, etc.)—occupies a prominent place in the national

discourse and the struggle over laws and institutions. According to many observers, the 2004

presidential election was decided on “values issues.”

6. Religious innovation and even unorthodoxy. Americans are innovators, pragmatists, tinkers.

They are only loyal to a thing as long as it “works.” They also trust individual inspiration and

authority. And the country was largely settled in the first place by people who had to and

were willing to break away from traditional homes and authorities. Americans tend to be

willing to try out the new, although this “new” often repackages familiar themes. Some of the

most powerful themes have been sin, the apocalypse and “doomsday,” the “chosen people,”

and individual salvation. This has enabled Americans to reinterpret or invent many divergent

teachings about these basic components which, when mixed with technology and “modern”

experiences like UFOs, has manifested in some surprising syncretistic results. But as Philip

Jenkins (2000) has concluded, extreme and bizarre religious ideas are not a “fringe”

phenomenon in America at all; they may be the essence of American religion.

A Brief History of American Religions

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Just as American religion is not monolithic, it has not been historically immutable. Instead, it has

passed through a number of phases, each unique in certain ways but also recognizable for

common recurring themes. The first phase of American religion was the “establishment” phase,

in which local communities or entire colonies accepted one (or occasionally more than one)

religion as the “official” religion, with the economic and political benefits that flowed from it. For

instance, governmental bodies would often mandate taxes for the payment of clergy and the

maintenance of church facilities and programs. The end of this phase—“disestablishment”—

began with the ratification of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights but is still in progress today.

This entailed the disentanglement of religion and politics and the breakup of special relationships

between the government and any (or all) religions or churches. The philosophy, as Thomas

Jefferson expressed it, was that people should not be made to support a religion that they do not

believe in and that both church and state would be healthier if they were kept apart. However,

even before this development transpired—indeed, before the United States was an independent

nation—important movements and changes were already occurring, including the first in a cycle

of religious revivals in what became known as the “Great Awakening.”

The years between 1720 and 1750 are noted for not only an escalation of religious piety and

activity but a change in these factors that was at once novel and typical. The first century of

English occupation of America had been characterized by institutional domination and rigidity of

doctrine and expression. The Great Awakening represents in part a loosening of these bonds but

also a “popularization” of religion, the likes of which we have addressed before and will address

again. This first awakening, like the second and perhaps the one that is occurring in the 21st

century, highlights the processes of innovation, individualism and emotionalism, and anti-

authoritarianism and populism described above. Marty (1984) posited that the essence of the

moment was choice, in both senses of the word: each person must individually choose to commit

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to religion, and each person has choices as to how to commit, that is, multiple “churches” to

choose between. This was not what the original settlers had envisioned when they established

official churches for specific communities or colonies. However, try as they may, they could not

prevent the emergence of new sects and denominations, sometimes simpler but more effective

than their own. Some of these new sects would join the mainstream churches of our day,

including the Baptists and the Methodists.

These were “grass roots” religious movements, literally bringing religion to the people, especially

the people who had left colonial cities and moved inland. New and competing churches emerged

even in towns like Boston, but the towns and their universities, like Harvard, were seen by many

as places where “men of renown” and learned theologians resided—people who studied religion,

to be sure, but did not live religion and could not communicate religion to the common folk. Their

erudite sermons did not have the “fire” that a person enflamed by the Holy Spirit should have,

and so they could not transmit that fire. This task fell to men of passion, if not learning, like

Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, James Davenport, Charles Woodmason, Devereux Jarratt,

and Samuel Morris. Among them were the first “circuit-riders” of religion, itinerant preachers

who traveled from village to farm to hamlet, stopping to spread the Gospel in open-air or tent

“revivals” wherever they could assemble an audience. They spoke with the well-known

enthusiasm of the evangelist—in fact, they were the first American evangelists, bearers of the

“message” (evangel comes from the Greek root for messenger or good messenger). Not only did

they circulate among the masses, but they delivered the message in a style and language that the

masses could digest. To their opponents—and the staid and established clergy and churches were

their opponents—they were crazy and dangerous. Jarratt for instance knew that the churchmen

saw him as “an enthusiast, fanatic, visionary, dissenter, …madman” (Marty 1984: 123). But they

stirred the listeners, and that was the point.

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In his study of American religiosity, Eugene Taylor described the emotionalism and

unconventionality of the proceedings and their after-effects: “Trance states, ecstatic whirling,

automatic utterances, falling down in the spirit, joyful exuberance, and spiritual happiness were

all common occurrences” (1999: 18). Those were the signs of the Holy Spirit and of the success

of their missions. Perhaps most compelling and sinister was their contemporary view that they

were in a great battle—not only a battle against sin and the devil but against each other. Samuel

Davies stated it clearly: “The art of war becomes a part of our religion” (quoted in Marty 126).

The period from 1750 to the early 1800s was marked by relative calm in American religion,

perhaps enforced by the literal battle for independence of the new country. Also, as mentioned, it

was the period of the first efforts to “disestablish” official religions wherever they existed. This

was not done, it must be emphasized, out of any animosity toward religion but generally out of

real concern for religion. It was also a time of nation-building and tolerant inclusion: George

Washington himself said that his workers at Mount Vernon could be Christian, Muslim, or

Jewish, African or Asian, and even atheist, as long as they worked well. And it was a time in

which the first efflorescence of new religions and sects settled into their mature and

institutionalized forms. For instance, by the early 1800s Methodism had grown from less than

five thousand members to over 200,000. The leaders of the dominant churches were more than

happy to see the enthusiasm of past decades subside.

Perhaps the new awakening of religion was a reaction to the decades of quiescence, or perhaps to

the social upheavals of starting a new country, together with its expansion ever westward, where

old authorities had little power or did not exist at all. No doubt a major contributor to the next

outbreak of religious enthusiasm and innovation was the energy released by the very

disestablishment of the traditional founding churches; now all churches, old and new, orthodox

and unorthodox, were free to compete in the marketplace of religion, depending on who could

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offer the most appealing product. So, about a century after the First Great Awakening, a Second

followed in its footsteps. It was a movement of a frontier society on the brink of industrialization;

it was in some measure a grasping for the certainty, the lost stability, that marks so many ages of

new religious movements. Not surprisingly, it was a period (from around 1820 to around 1850) of

new variations on old themes and the foundation of still more, and more heterodox, sects, many

of which survive today as more or less orthodox and mainstream churches or religions.

One of the first signs of a new phase in American religion was the emergence of a “primitive

Christianity” movement originating in various quarters. In the early 1800s Elias Smith had called

for a simpler, more egalitarian kind of Christianity, one in which the masses could interpret the

Bible for themselves; his camp eschewed even a name and merely referred to themselves as

“Christian” or “Disciples of Christ.” James O’Kelly’s Christianity was even more political,

saying: “I contend for Bible government, Christian equality, and the Christian name” (quoted in

Hatch 1989: 70). Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell led yet other segments of the primitivist

movement, and their followers, unnamed “Christians” and “Disciples of Christ” respectively,

combined in 1830 to form the fifth-largest Protestant denomination by the end of the era.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) appeared in this period, as did the

Millerites and Seventh-Day Adventists. Late in the era the Church of Christ, Scientist (Christian

Science) was organized by Mary Baker Eddy (formally inaugurated in 1879) as one of the “health

conscious” movements syncretizing religion and science with the kind of “mind cure” that we

still see today in Scientology and Raelianism.

Pervading the age and many of these specific religious movements was a set of more general

themes, including communitarianism, perfectionism, and “transcendentalism,” along with the

familiar beliefs in scripture and the second coming. The communitarian and perfectionist impulse

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could be seen in a variety of forms, religious and “social.” Utopian communities were created by

idealists, as in the Oneida community, where private property and often traditional propriety were

eliminated. The “Shakers” or United Society of Believers, founded as early as the end of the

1700s, was another example. Started by “Mother Ann” Lee, it became a separatist colony

demanding common property, strict discipline, unitarianism, material simplicity, spiritual

perfection, and absolute celibacy. In all of these movements we see a new and more urgent kind

of rejection of and withdrawal from the world than seen before in American history.

The other element of the first half of the 1800s was a fascination with “mentalism” or the power

of thought and a kind of naturalism that approached supernaturalism, called transcendentalism.

This movement was characterized by the recurrent American theme that, as Marty attributet to

one of its greatest prophets, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “religion must have feeling, must be feeling”

(1984: 210). Two older influences helped shape the notion—Mesmerism and Swedenborgianism.

Mesmerism arose from the work of Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), a founding father of

modern hypnotism, who explained the odd phenomenon of hypnosis and especially hypnotic

suggestion as an effect of “animal magnetism.” The mind, or perhaps the entire human being, was

seen as an electrical system, with mental or spiritual energy that could not only affect the health

and happiness of the individual but demonstrably of other individuals as well (e.g., the hypnotic

subject). The other source of transcendentalist thought came from Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-

1771), including his writings The Worship and the Love of God and his eight-volume Arcana

Coelestia. His main claim was that the Christian Bible was not to be taken as a literal, historical

document but as a spiritual code or allegory. He viewed existence as having three “levels” or

“planes”—the physical (animal, vegetable, and mineral), the spiritual, and the celestial. Each of

these planes reiterated the others, such that every entity on the physical plane (he called them

“ultimates”) had a corollary on the spiritual and celestial planes. Therefore, there was no need for

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slavish obedience to or pained interpretations of the scriptures; the point was to know one’s

relation to the higher realms of reality and to put one’s affections and actions in order.

The early nineteenth-century American transcendentalists who put these thoughts into practice

included Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. American transcendentalism revered nature, but not

so much out of love for nature as because it was the visible manifestation of the spiritual. As

Taylor put it, “Nature had to be preserved in order to remain an effective transmitting medium,

and character had to be perfected so the light could shine through” (63). In this philosophy,

“knowing” nature was not as important as “feeling” nature; in fact, in general, knowing was not

as important as feeling. Second and more scandalously, as Emerson stated explicitly, it not only

displaced but actually rejected old, literalist “religion” in favor of spiritual intuition. Religion as

usually performed was little more than “the dead forms of our forefathers” (quoted in Marty 210).

People could have a direct, intuitive experience of the spiritual, via nature, without reference to

the fossilized old law. Mainstream Christians, the transcendentalists charged, experienced

religion “through the eyes” of the ancients, while transcendentalists claimed they could see the

spiritual source for themselves. They literally asked Americans to “forget historical Christianity.”

Once again the spiritual strivings of Americans were sidetracked, this time by the Civil War and

the period of Reconstruction. However, by the 1870s many of the old yearnings had returned in

recognizable but often distinctly new forms, particularly ones influenced by Eastern, especially

Hindu and Buddhist, sources. This new assortment of religious interests and movements would

sufficiently resemble the late-twentieth century “New Age” as to make the latter seem much less

novel.

The religious innovations of the second half of the nineteenth century represented a blend of

spiritualism, “mind cure,” and Eastern religion. Spiritualism was and is an independent

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phenomenon in its own right, not directly tied to any particular religion. Related to the

transcendentalist spirituality of previous decades, as well as to general notions about souls and

life-after-death, it involved “interdimensional” communication between the living and the dead.

Spiritualist “mediums” would conduct special rituals or séances, inviting the deceased to “speak”

to the assembled party either through the voice of the medium or through other “signs” such as

knocks and raps, automatic writing (as with a blank chalkboard or Ouija board), tipping over

furniture, and other overt activity. Uriah Clark even published a guide for séance procedures in

1863 called Plain Guide to Spiritualism.

Mentalist/mind cure/”thought power” movements, of the sorts developed before 1850, were

another major force in American life. In fact, the overarching movement was known as “New

Thought” and took many different forms. A pioneer in the field of “mental healing” was Phineas

Parkhurst Quimby (1802-1866), who began conducting healing sessions after 1840, first using a

hypnotized subject as his medium of diagnosis and cure. By the late 1860s Quimby dropped the

partner and did his own curing, using a combination of touch, hypnotic gestures, visual imagery,

and talk. He would enter into a clairvoyant state, where he could observe the patient’s “mental

atmosphere” (like an “aura” in some modern-day practices) containing the person’s memories and

beliefs; the cure amounted to an “adjustment” of those memories and beliefs.

By the time of the “first New Age,” mind cure was big business. Warren Felt Evans (1817-1889),

who was himself treated by Quimby, became a leading practitioner; in 1869 he wrote The Mental

Cure, followed by Mental Medicine (1872) and Soul and Body (1875). For him as for Quimby

and many to come, the cause of illness was unhealthy thoughts and beliefs. Henry Wood

represented another but familiar side of the mentalist movement, that is, the use of “visualization”

or mental imagery. In his 1893 Ideal Suggestion Through Mental Photography he essentially

appropriated Swedenborg’s tripartite distinction (here, material, psychological, and spiritual),

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suggesting that humans exist on all three levels simultaneously but that disease results from

fixating solely on the material. In reality, he suggested, neither illness nor healing is a purely

physical process but a psychological/spiritual one too. In fact, recovery truly occurs when the

patient opens his or her heart and mind to the “great light” of God, achieved through specific

“meditations” and ideal thoughts, such as “God is here,” “I am not this body,” and “I will be

healed.”

Of all of the “spiritual medicine” movements, the most important and enduring has been Christian

Science. Founded by Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), it survives today as a strong if controversial

church based on the relation between the mind, spirit, and body. Like Evans, she was cured by

Quimby of a nervous condition. However, in the year that Quimby died (1866) she suffered a

spinal injury from a fall, for which she refused medical treatment and “willed herself well”

through religious and biblical realizations and affirmations. She emerged, healed, with the

conviction that mind is everything and body nothing. In 1875, after a decade of traveling,

teaching, and healing, she wrote Science and Health, announcing her system of physical health

through the powers of God alone, apart from any mesmerism or spiritualism or non-Christian,

non-scriptural techniques. In 1879 she was able to create the Church of Christ Scientist in Boston

and shortly thereafter the Massachusetts Metaphysical College. Finally, in 1883 the journal

Christian Science Monitor appeared.

Finally, in the mid and late 1800s Western scholars were discovering Asian scriptures, including

the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu Vedas, and the various Buddhist sutras. Archaeological discoveries

in Egypt and Mesopotamia, India, and the Americas also provided fodder for religious creativity.

Probably the most pervasive and influential was Theosophy (from the Greek for “god-wisdom”).

The Theosophical Society was founded in 1875-6 by “Madame” Helena Blavatsky and Henry

Olcott, born out of Blavatsky’s alleged spiritualist/occult powers. In her 1877 Isis Unveiled she

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elaborated her occult system, received from “ascended masters” who revealed the knowledge to

her. In 1879 she and Olcott moved the Theosophical Society to India, where it absorbed more

Hindu content and practice (and where Hinduism absorbed its). Yoga and meditation were

discovered and transmitted to the American public; Hindu terms and concepts like samadhi and

guru were popularized. In 1888 she compiled her teachings into the “Bible” of Theosophy, The

Secret Doctrine.

Perhaps the defining moment of the age came at its end, during the World’s Parliament of

Religions in Chicago in 1893. At this event, representatives of many religions stood next to each

other—mainline Protestants, Catholics, Jews, “new religious movements” like Christian Science,

and other religions from around the globe. The most dramatic figure was apparently Swami

Vivekananda, the first impresario of Hinduism to the West but by no means the last. Non-

Western religion found a home in America.

By the turn of the twentieth century, many of these foreign religious concepts and groups had

gone mainstream. However, the period from about 1910 also represents a particular moment of

resistance from the mainstream Christians, who saw themselves in a “battle royal” not only with

forces of secularization and science but equally or more so with “internal” forces, “religious”

people—even Christians—who were making too many concessions to the non-Christian world.

Meanwhile, the “esoteric” movements of the previous century showed no exhaustion either but

rather an almost infinite vitality and variability. Not far behind the Hindu wave came Buddhism,

particularly Zen Buddhism. Daisetz Taitaro Suzuki (1870-1966) brought Zen to San Francisco in

1897, where he introduced Americans to Zen and Taoist writings. Not only that, but in 1911 he

married a Theosophist and himself undertook a study of Swedenborgianism, as well as the

religious psychology of William James, thereby Easternizing certain American traditions and

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Americanizing certain Eastern ones. Eventually, it would become impossible to separate the two.

In 1927 he published his Essays on Zen Buddhism, and he was sufficiently mainstream by 1955 to

become a visiting professor at Columbia University—a year after the Tibetan Dalai Lama became

an international figure.

The “esoteric boom” of the early 1900s had many other forms and faces. Some of its leading

figures were Aleister Crowley, Edgar Cayce, and H.P Lovecraft. The following is a very short list

of organizations and publications appearing over the span of two or three decades:

1902 R. Swinburne Clymer publishes history of the Rosicrucian movement

1907 Levi H. Dowling publishes The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ

1911 Rudolf Steiner’s The Submerged Continents of Atlantis and Lemuria translated from

German

1915 H. Spencer Lewis founds Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis

1920 Paul Foster Case founds mystical order called Builders of the Adytum

1923 Alice Bailey opens Arcane School in New York

1924-35 Baird T. Spalding publishes 5-volume Life and Teachings of the Masters of the Far

East

1924 Ian Ferguson publishes The Philosophy of Witchcraft

1928 Manly Hall publishes Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabalistic, and

Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy

1933 James Hilton publishes Lost Horizon. William Dudley Pelley founds Christian-Fascist

“Silver Legion of America” (the Silver Shirts)

1936 Lemurian Society founded in Wisconsin

This was clearly a fertile time for movements that played on certain powerful themes, including

“revealed teachings,” ancient predecessors, arcane knowledge, Eastern wisdom, and esoteric or

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“gnostic” Christianity. The appeal of ancient symbolism was so strong that even the Ku Klux

Klan in the 1920s began to use titles like Hydra and Giant and Great Titan and Exalted Cyclops.

Much of the claim to antiquity was hopeful at best and fictitious at worst; the “wiccan” religion,

which purports to be a revival of pagan pre-Christian beliefs and practices, is largely the

invention of Gerald Gardner, from such writings as his 1948 A Goddess Arrives, 1954 Witchcraft

Today, and 1959 The Meaning of Witchcraft.

Religious innovation, often in the name of traditionalism, also took place in the African-

American churches. Not the least of these was the “Black Muslim” movement, descending from

Timothy Drew or “Noble Drew Ali.” In 1913 he opened the Moorish Science Temple in Newark,

attracting many followers of Marcus Garvey and his “Back to Africa” movement. The Nation of

Islam itself was born around 1930 from the efforts of a prophet named Wallace Fard or Wali

Farad or Wallace Ford Muhammad. These organizations had multiple inspirations, but among

them was the 1927 account by William Seabrook entitled Adventures in Arabia, which chronicled

various secret Muslim sects such as the Druze. There were also “black Jew” denominations,

probably after the model of the Church of God and Saints in Christ originated by William S.

Crowdy. Other examples include the “Father Divine” movement identified with George Baker

who by 1915 was referring to himself as a personification of God. Finally, the Caribbean

syncretism known as voodoo (or Vodun or Vodoun) offered itself as an “authentic” religion of

the African diaspora, a mixture of transplanted Africa traditions, Christianity, and indigenous

elements. William Seabrook’s 1929 contribution, The Magic Island, had its impact as well.

All of this proliferation of cults and religions was visible to the public at the time, many of whom

felt themselves under continuous assault from crazy, dangerous cults and false prophets. There

was a significant backlash against the cultism of the early century, akin to the backlash in the

1980s against the “hippy” and California cults of the 1960s and 1970s. Much of the taming of the

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cults simply occurred with the reversal of American fortunes in the Depression of the 1930s and

then the Second World War. However, as soon as that war was finished, the energy and attention

returned to religious innovation and resistance against it.

Within the mainstream Christian world, the established denominations and churches attempted to

carry on as usual, and many of the “new religions” of the 1800s had now earned a permanent

place in American society. However, the new more militant brand of American Christian

fundamentalism had gotten its start in the first decades of the 1900s. In fact, new energetic styles,

if not exactly churches, emerged and then mobilized to become true political forces by the end of

the century. Two of these styles are evangelicalism and Pentecostalism. Evangelicalism, perhaps

represented best by Billy Graham in the late twentieth century, is the “good news” wing of

contemporary American Christianity. An evangelical is, among other things, a “born again”

Christian, one who has made the personal commitment to Jesus and become a messenger of the

Gospel. Pentecostalism goes a step further and is one of the, if not the, fastest growing segment of

Christianity, nationally and internationally. Marty connected the contemporary Pentecostal

movement to a group of devotees at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh in 1966, who claim to

have been “baptized in the spirit” (1984: 465) and to have exhibited the “gifts” thereof—

prophesying, healing, and most commonly “speaking in tongues” (glossolia). However, we can

trace the essence of the movement back much further and recognize it as one of those recurring

themes of American religion—the personal contact with the “spiritual” and the wonders that flow

from it—wonders of revelation and of power. Pentecostalism, possession of or by the Holy Spirit,

is a form of the “enthusiasm” that American religion has repeatedly demonstrated.

ANTHROPOLOGY OF AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY

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A phenomenon as sprawling and socially embedded as American religion seems almost

impossible to study, especially for a discipline that distinguishes itself on ethnographies of

particular local groups, institutions, and activities. However, if we realize that American religion

is actually a vast field of precisely such groups, institutions, and activities rather than a single

unified “thing,” the anthropological approach suddenly appears not only relevant but essential to

the task.

Yet, in Chapter 8 of Introducing Anthropology of Religion (2nd ed.) we noted that as little as a

decade ago anthropologists were bemoaning the lack of an anthropology of Christianity, let alone

an anthropology of American Christianity. And in Fenella Cannell’s resulting The Anthropology

of Christianity (2006), the United States does not figure as the primary research site of any of its

ten case studies.

Among anthropology’s earliest forays into American Christianity were examinations of non-

mainstream communities and sects like the Amish or the black “spiritual” churches. John

Hostetler’s book Amish Society was first published in 1963 and revised in 1968; he followed that

work with a study, co-authored by Gertrude Enders Huntington (1971) on children and education

among the Amish. In his earlier piece, Hostetler conceived of Amish society as a “little

community” in contrast to and in the midst of the “great society” of America, in the style of

Robert Redfield (see Chapter 8). The Amish, he wrote,

are small, a splinter group, whose members conform to traditions based upon biblical

teachings, and who stress separation from the world. A mentality of separation as well as

sentiments of persecution are maintained. When asked about his distinctive traditions, an

Amishman may simply say: “This is the old way of our forefathers who lived and died in the

faith. If it was good enough for them it is good enough for us.”

(1968: 8)

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As is well known, the Amish kept and keep a unique culture, including “styles of clothing and

grooming, a distinct language, a common occupation, intimate knowledge of other members of

the community, and religious ceremony and common sentiment” (9-10). And of course

Amish life is distinctive in that it is pervasively religious. The core values of the community

are religious beliefs. Not only do the members worship God as they understand him through

the revelation of Jesus Christ and the Bible, but patterned behavior has a religious

dimension. Religion permeates daily life, agriculture, health considerations, and the

application of energy to economic ends.

(10)

Hostetler went on to describe Amish family, life events and ceremonies, and in this and his

second book education and schooling.

Soon, Hans Baer followed with an investigation into the African American “Spiritual” churches

of Nashville, Tennessee, which he characterized as a syncretic blend of “Protestantism,

Spiritualism [see above], Catholicism, and Voodooism” (1980: 53). The eleven congregations in

his research varied from “‘storefront churches, regular church buildings, and former homes which

have been reconverted into churches” to small groups gathering in individual members’ homes

(54). While some of these churches used the term “Spiritual,” others employed names like

“Holiness,” “Divine Science,” or “Holiness church with a spiritual mind.” Tracing the Spiritual

Movement to a Mother Anderson of New Orleans in the early twentieth century, Baer found that

it arrived in Nashville in the 1930s, with two congregations established as late as 1976. The

typical growth process was schism: “An ambitious individual who wishes to assume the role of

pastor may decide the best way to achieve this is to establish his own church” (57), which began

in his home and ideally evolved into a permanent dedicated facility. Membership in these

churches was small, Baer reckoned, with between three and forty people showing up for a

service.

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These Spiritual churches, he judged, were “superb examples of syncretism and incorporate

elements from a diversity of religious traditions”; at the same time, they “generally lack a well-

defined formal creed and permit a diversity of beliefs among their members. The manner in

which elements from various religious traditions are combined depends largely on the perspective

of the local pastors and their main disciples” (59). Spiritual services typically included “hymn

singing, the emphasis on testimonies, the elaborate manner of taking up the offering, the call and

response pattern, and the style of delivering the sermon or message”; they also featured “spirit

possession, divine healing, prophesy, shouting, hand clapping and foot stomping, and tambourine

playing” but interestingly seldom speaking in tongues (59). In addition to these enthusiastic

practices, at least some members used “a wide variety of amulets, charms, incense sprays, herbs,

baths, floor washes, perfumes, oils, special soaps, talismans, powders, roots, and incenses” (61).

Baer concluded:

Despite certain functional similarities between the Spiritual movement and Black Protestant

groups, it is the emphasis on the manipulation of one's present condition through the use of

various magico-religious practices that tends to distinguish the former from some of the

more conventional religions among Black Americans. The belief that events can be

controlled by magico-religious practices is found in all walks of life, but particularly among

the poor.

(63)

Box 1 Prayer and Suffering in a Contemporary Holiness Church

Spiritual or Holiness Christianity is not exclusive to the South or to African Americans, as Parvis

Ghassem-Fachandi’s recent study of an upstate New York church illustrates. The beliefs of the

Church of the Nazarene advocate “Christ-like living (‘scriptural holiness’) and the establishment

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of an intimate, personal relationship with God. The fellowship with Christ promises life after

death, and more importantly, stresses a deeper present life in which there can be victory over sin

through the witnessing and serving of God by means of the power of the Holy Spirit” (2007:

236). Unlike Baer’s Spiritual congregations, the members of the Church of the Nazarene are

primarily white but poor, uneducated, and lower class; significantly, “women with children but

without husbands” are common at the services, and “family break-ups” are a major concern of the

church (238). Ghassem-Fachandi goes so far as to assert that it “might be characterized as a

church of the ‘fallen and left-behind.’ What is left behind in the church is what appears to be the

detritus of Ithacan Christian society: the poor, the goofers, the ugly, the disfigured, the one-

legged, the cancerous, the humiliated, the divorces, the interminably ill…. Instead of

experiencing upward mobility, their trajectory has been only downward” (239). He argues that

“abjection” or the experience of being left out and beaten down is central to the church, which is

“complemented by a proud nationalist rhetoric with a peculiar ‘American’ twist: an ultra-

conservative worldview that foregrounds suspicion of the central government” (239). Prayer is

the primary response to the threats to the members and the country, since the church’s doctrine

“understands life to be a concrete battle against the power of evil that lurks everywhere. Any

emotionally unsettling event requires a supplication in the form of immediate prayer, irrespective

if in response to personal disappointments and setbacks in life, marital conflict, or political

events” (240). Collective prayer more than individual prayer is key, which “has the character of a

public shaming ritual” (241). “To be prayed for and to request a prayer defines the essence of

participation in the community, and results in a kind of transparency about private desires and

lives” (242). But the “recognition and voicing of pain” is only the first step in a process that leads

through “the promise of the wrath of God” to “the transformation of abjection into chosenness”

(246). However, members do not expect to have their abjection suddenly lifted; instead, “forms of

abjection become a religious good through prayer and its symbolic transformation of weakness

and bodily ailments into power, chosenness, and the promise of the wrath of God. The mutual

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laments and exchanges of weaknesses and ailments relate the small community to itself…. Sin is

the only thing left to offer to Him. Yet, although repentance should lead to the state of grace, to

being freed of sin and ‘innocent like a baby,’ sin always again returns and inscribes itself onto the

trembling subject” (255) who remains all the same abject. Prayer only “affirms parishioners’

sense of abjection,” and “those political ideologies most conducive of escaping this vicious cycle

are branded as the most evil of all” (256).

American Evangelical Christianity

One of the most striking developments of the twentieth century was the rise of evangelical

Christianity in the United States, and anthropologists could not help but take notice of this

happening. Evangelical pastors, churches, and organizations became major players in American

society and politics, especially after 1979 and the formation of the Moral Majority and Focus on

the Family. As discussed in Chapter 8, Susan Harding did fieldwork inside Jerry Falwell’s

ministry in the 1990s, documenting the philosophy and structure of this new kind of American

Christianity that broke the pre-existing truce between evangelicalism (as a movement strictly

interested in “saving souls”) and the wider political and secular society. The great achievement of

this new form of evangelicalism was to modernize Christianity at the same time that it sought to

Christianize society. Falwell reasoned that “God wanted fundamentalists to reenter, to reoccupy,

the world” and to use modern social and political tactics to achieve their goal, indeed to learn and

absorb the lessons of business and popular suburban culture. The role of preachers like Falwell

was to “‘stand in the gap’ between the language of the Christian Bible and the language of

everyday life,” translating biblical talk “into local theological and cultural idioms and placing

present events inside the sequences of the Biblical stories. Church people, in their turn, borrow,

customize, and reproduce the Bible-based speech of their preachers and other leaders in their

daily lives” (2000: 12). Precisely because preachers and congregants spoke the same Christian

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language, the church did not have to institute a rigid centralized structure; instead, Falwell’s

organization “was managed by loose, fragmentary pastoral networks or weak denominational

structures,” leaning heavily on “parachurch organizations” (274), like branches of a franchise

“big box” department store. Falwell recognized

the synergistic principle of placing at least two or more services at one location to attract the

customers. A combination of services of two large companies with small supporting stores

has been the secret of the success of shopping center. The Thomas Road Baptist Church

believes that the combined ministries of several agencies in one church can not only attract

the masses to the gospel, but can better minister to each individual who comes.

(16)

In an earlier essay Harding stressed the point that evangelical Christianity—indeed all

Christianity and all religion—is essentially a form of language and that “converting” amounts to

acquiring a new language. Christianity, but especially Protestantism, has long “centered on

words, on the Word” (1987: 168), and most brands of Protestant Christianity distinguished

themselves from Catholic and Orthodox churches by stripping away the visual and ritual

trappings and concentrating, sometimes exclusively, on language (e.g. scriptures). Observing a

fundamentalist Baptist congregation, Harding claimed that among the linguistic practices through

which members perform their religion—and through which individuals are inducted into the

religion—the two most important were preaching and witnessing. Preaching or giving a sermon

“is a formal oration addressed to a body of believers and nonbelievers by an ordained or anointed

speaker in church services and revivals. Sermons occur in the context of clear ritual format, of a

collective, sanctifying scenario, in which the mode of interpretation is enacted” (168-9).

Witnessing on the other hand “is more informal and often occurs in the course of what appears to

be no more than a conversation between the witness, who is saved, and an unsaved listener”(169).

As such, any person, not just an ordained minister, can—and should—engage in witnessing. But,

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whether it is between two members or between a member and a nonbeliever, witnessing “is no

mere conversation. The witness and the unsaved ‘do not share a common understanding—either

of the immediate situation or of reality more generally.’ Witnesses are ‘aware of this difference in

understanding and self-consciously set out to change the views of those they address,’ and to

create a ‘compelling religious reality completely at variance with their [listener’s] experience’

(Borker n.d.: 1, 3)” (169).

The goal of preaching and witnessing, with their characteristic use of biblical and biographical

narratives, was to reshape the listeners’ experience, to create a “crisis” in the listener, which is the

first step in the conversion process or “what fundamentalists call ‘coming under conviction’”

(170). If the process proceeds and succeeds, “the inner speech of ‘convicted sinners’ is

transformed as they are alienated from their previous voices (‘the old self,’ ‘natural man’); cast

into a limbo (‘lost,’ ‘in need,’ ‘searching’), that is to say, somehow in a liminal state, a state of

confusion and speechlessness; and begin to hear a new voice (‘an inaudible voice,’ ‘the Holy

Spirit’)” (170). This is the “inner rite of passage” that ends “when sinners are ‘saved,’ or ‘born-

again,’ ‘regenerated,’ ‘washed in the blood of Christ’” (170). Still more precisely, she reported

that the preaching-and-witnessing performance of the church’s minister consisted of five

“moves”: “equating his present listener with the listeners in his stories; defining the listener as

lost; defining the speaker as saved; transforming his narrative listeners into speakers; exhorting

his present listener to speak” (171). One implication of this linguistic view of religion is the

mutual unintelligibility of different religions or of religion and non-religion. Members literally

speak a different language from non-members, and on a certain level members of the religion

comprehend this: “believers say that unbelievers cannot understand their faith” (171)—not that

unbelievers think it is false but that they literally cannot comprehend what believers are saying.

As nonmembers become more acquainted with religious talk, as they acquire familiarity and

fluency, and as they practice it and perform it themselves, the talk—and the reality that the

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religion talks about—gradually becomes familiar, begins to make sense, and integrates into the

individual’s own subjective experience of her/himself and of the world.

Harding’s insistence that “spiritual realities are not communicated through sensuous,

nonlinguistic means” (168) is hardly applicable to all versions of Christianity, let alone of other

religions, but Tanya Luhrmann contests the claim that it is entirely true of evangelical

Protestantism. In a series of writings culminating in her 2012 When God Talks Back:

Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, Luhrmann asks how God

becomes real for American evangelicals, and she answers that “believing in” and experiencing

God is “a skill” acquired through “ritual practices and psychological techniques [that] are not

ancillary but central to contemporary spirituality. At least, congregants seem to want to

experience the Gospel in intensely bodily ways that seem to make the message of the Gospel

come alive for them in a way it has not previously” (2004: 518). Part of this learning process she

calls “metakinesis,” which is “a term used in dance criticism to depict the way emotional

experience is carried within the body so that the dancer conveys the emotion to the observer and,

yet, does it by making the expressive gesture uniquely his or her own” (519). In the context of

religion, she defines metakinesis as

mind-body states that are both identified within the group as the way of recognizing God’s

personal presence in your life and are subjectively and idiosyncratically experienced. These

states, or phenomena, are lexically identified and indeed the process of learning to have

these experiences cannot be neatly disentangled from the process of learning the words to

describe them.

(522)

Luhrmann does not deny the role of language, but she envisions it as only one of the means to the

construction of religious experience, including metakinesis and also relationship. Building off her

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ethnography of the Horizon Christian Fellowship in southern California, she writes that most

members believed “intellectually” in God before joining the church but did not actually

experience God and thus were not transformed. Through formal services, informal home-based

fellowship meetings, and extensive reading, people learned to “walk with God,” a phrase that

refers “both to learning to develop a relationship with God and to managing the everyday

challenges of your faith: temptation, frustration, and disappointment” (521). Further, the objective

“Word of God” in the Bible came to be felt as if it were speaking directly to—in fact, written

specifically for—each individual.

Of course, prayer is still a foundational religious practice, but Luhrmann asserts that it has two

effects.

First, it encourages people to attend to the stream of their own consciousness like eager

fishermen, scanning for the bubbles and whorls that suggest a lurking catch. And, perhaps,

because memory is adaptive and perception obliging, they begin to note the discontinuities

that are natural to our state and actually to interpret them as discontinuous, rather than

smoothing them over with the presumption of a simple integrated self. Second, it demands

that people engage in practices that help them to go into trance. Trance is an ominous-

sounding word, but I mean something relatively straightforward by it: that one can become

intensely absorbed in inner sensory stimuli and lose some peripheral awareness.

(524)

Members literally experience this transformation as “falling in love with Jesus,” which is

encouraged in its most literal sense: “They repeatedly spoke of Christ as their lover or their

greatest love and described this love in physical terms. Even the men did so, although for them

He was more buddy than boyfriend” (524).

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This obviously emphasizes the relational nature of this brand of evangelicalism. “At Horizon, the

goal of worship is to develop a relationship with God. Developing that relationship is explicitly

presented as the process of getting to know a person who is distinct, external, and opaque, and

whom you need to get to know in the ordinary way” (525). Together, these linguistic,

metakinetic, and relational skills “give a kind of real reality to God because they create the

experience of social exchange between opaque individuals, between individuals who cannot read

each other’s minds and must exchange goods or words in order to become real to each other, in

order to know each other’s intentions” (525). Elsewhere she calls this process an “inner sense

cultivation” (Luhrmann and Morgain 2012), learning to attend to and to interpret one’s own

thoughts and feelings in a new way, or a “cultural kindling of spiritual experiences” (Cassaniti

and Luhrmann 2014). (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qIrRNmOwjQ for a video of

Luhrmann’s talk to the Global Ethics Forum.)

Box 2 “Emerging Evangelicals” and the Emerging Church Movement

Like every other form of religion, American evangelical Christianity is an evolving and adapting

creature. One of its many incarnations is what theologians and members themselves call the

“Emerging Church movement,” and in his ethnography James Bielo describes Emerging

Evangelicals as “religious subjects reflecting and responding to the cultural conditions of

modernity and late modernity” (2011: 17). Bielo investigates their processes “of identities

fashioned, practices performed, discourses articulated, histories claimed, institutions created, and

ideas interrogated in this cultural field” (5), which might sound highly academic except for the

fact that Emerging Evangelicals actually speak this way. They tend to be “white, male, middle-

class, well-educated, urban, Gen-X pastors, church planters, church consultants, and concerned

laity” (5) who are well-versed in the language of modern society yet explicitly critique and

contrast themselves from the commercial, materialistic, inauthentic modern world—and from

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conventional evangelicalism. As modernists or postmodernists, one remarkable trait of Emerging

Evangelicals is irony, a certain “indirectness, inversion, circumlocution, satire, parody, pretense,”

and playful self-awareness (49). This allows them to engage in humor (not usually associated

with serious Christianity) and in “worshiping God in ways that seem patently non-Evangelical”

such as “public reading of monastic and Catholic prayers, burning incense, replacing fluorescent

lighting with candles, setting early Protestant hymns to contemporary music, chanting Eastern

Orthodox prayers, using icons, creating prayer labyrinths,” and so forth (71). In a word, they

borrow and blend, innovate and simulate, all while claiming to get back to the basics or

fundamentals of their religion. They also talk in terms of other paradoxes, such as “ancient-

future” and the “now, not yet kingdom.” Ultimately, Bielo concludes that modern or postmodern

society need not “result in a loss of faith” (197) but that Christianity, even evangelicalism, can be

as diverse, syncretic, and (post)modern as any element of culture.

Inventing and Exporting American Christianities

Cultures do not respect social or national boundaries; they circulate transnationally, combining

with local elements in a process that has been dubbed “glocalization.” Religions are the same:

many new religious movements and characteristically American kinds of Christianity have

appeared in the United States and then been carried to other societies by missionaries, literature,

and digital media. In fact, in the late twentieth century, Americans have been primary

proselytizers of Christianity around the world, through such organizations as the U.S. Center for

World Mission (www.uscwm.org; see http://www.missionfrontiers.org for its online magazine

Mission Frontiers), Mission Nexus (http://missionexus.org) of the Great Commission Community

of North America, Bible translation agencies like the Summer Institute of Linguistics (sil.org),

and any number of projects sponsored by specific churches and denominations. The result has

been the evolution of what Rebecca Kim calls “American global Christianity,” with its three

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components of “American imperialism, a modern-necolonial imperialism; American Christianity,

particularly American Protestant Christianity, which remains influential in the United States and

abroad; and a white dominant racial hierarchy that is embedded in both American imperialism

and American Christianity” (2015: 9).

Two highly influential brands of American global Christianity have been Pentecostalism and

Mormonism. According to Robert Hefner (2013), the history of Pentecostalism—a style of

Christianity that emphasizes “gifts of the Holy Spirit” such as miraculous healing and speaking in

tongues—in North America is usually traced to the Azusa Street Revival in south Los Angeles

between 1906 and 1909. By 1907 mission churches had been set up in India, China, and Chile as

well as European countries like Norway and England; within a few years there were branches in

Brazil, Russia, Mexico, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

Predictably, most of the anthropological attention to Pentecostalism has focused on non-Western

sites, but Josh Brahinsky for one has investigated the phenomenon in the United States. Invoking

Luhrmann’s analysis of religious metakinetic learning, he contends that “Pentecostals are deeply

enmeshed in this kind of learning. In building a locus for the connoisseur, sage, and savant of

transcendence, Pentecostals put intensive study into bodies, texts, practices, and their

interrelationships so as to effectively invite experience of what they call the ‘Holy Spirit’” (2012:

216-7). His interest is the “sensorium” or universe of sensations and experiences of

Pentecostalism, arriving at the surprising conclusion—to those who imagine Christianity as a

purely “spiritual” and otherworldly doctrine—that for Pentecostals, “corporeality provides a

means toward spiritual legitimacy. For Pentecostals, bodies matter. But more, the significant body

emerges from a consciously cultivated sensorium, where contested negotiations between doctrine

and practice as well as the modern outside invigorate vernacular corporeal logics” (232).

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With even deeper roots in American soil, Mormonism or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day

Saints (LDS) harks back to the enthusiasms of nineteenth-century American Christianity.

Originating in upstate New York in the 1820s from revelations experienced by Joseph Smith, the

LDS congregation traveled to Illinois and eventually settled in their “desert kingdom” of Utah in

1847, from which they rapidly dispatched missions to Latin America and the Pacific. Today the

church boasts fifteen million members worshipping in 189 languages worldwide, with 84,000

missionaries in the field (see www.mormonnewsroom.org/facts-and-stats).

In one of the few book-length anthropological studies of LDS, Melvyn Hammarberg explains that

members

see themselves as actively transforming the world and its people into the kingdom of God on

earth, anticipating the millennial reign of Jesus Christ prior to the final judgment. In the

process, they also believe they are achieving personal standing among the community of all

spirit persons—whether previously born into this mortal life, living now, or yet unborn—

who will be organized as immortal celestial families for eternity. This vision of the past,

present, and future is cosmic in scope, yet grounded in an American restoration of all things

that Latter-Day Saints (LDS) believe are ancient, sacred, and eternal.

(2013: 1)

Hammarberg documents the history of the denomination, its basic beliefs, and what he calls its

“life plan” for members who are registered at birth as “a child-of-record” in the church and then

subjected to a number of life stages and rituals such as baptism and confirmation. He describes

the formal training for children, who are introduced to church doctrines through classroom

teaching from age eighteen months to eleven years with manuals, magazines, and other materials

published by the church. Mission work is a standard part of the Mormon experience, with all

young males recommended to undertake a two-year period of mission; approximately one-third of

males accept the duty, as well as ten percent of females. For this purpose, the Missionary

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Training Center in Provo, Utah provides instruction for missionaries, whether their destination is

“stateside” or international.

World Christianity Comes to America

And so it seems that the flow of Christianity has been from America (and Europe, of course) to

the non-Western world. However, as anthropologists have long commented, non-Western

societies have accepted American or Western global Christianity selectively and have actively

invented their own Christianities. Hence, observers like Philip Jenkins (2007) have perceived a

new global Christianity, which he calls The Next Christendom, coming out of the non-West and

especially out of the “global south” of Latin America, Africa, and India. Naturally these non-

Western and southern Christianities travel with migrants from these other parts of the world, such

as the Haitians who brought and/or established not only Catholic but also Protestant (and some

Vodou) congregations in southern Florida. And like other new arrivals, they brought what Terry

Rey and Alex Stepick call, following Pierre Bourdieu, their own cross-denominational religious

collusio—a shared style or worldview—that “life in this world is inhabited by invisible,

supernatural forces that are to be served and which can be called upon and operationalized toward

healing ills, mitigating plights, enhancing luck, and achieving goals” (2013: 9-10). The Haitian

style or collusio features “the generation of and quest for ‘salvation goods’ in the form of luck

(chans), magic (mahi), protection, health, prosperity, and, especially, worthiness” (5), whatever

the specific Christian (or non-Christian) faith.

Many such communities do religion basically by and for their own community. Much more

pertinent are those Christian churches and sects that are self-consciously involved in what has

been called “reverse mission,” that is, to missionize and Christianize their former missionary

masters with their own understandings and styles of Christianity. A number of African Christian

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churches has been documented actively proselytizing their particular Christian message to

Americans (and Europeans), like the Presbyterian Church of Ghana in New York (PCGNY),

which Moses Biney characterizes as “an overseas mission” (2011: 65) of African Christians to the

United States. So far, understandably, the PCGNY is more an outreach to Ghanaian immigrants

living in the U.S. than a serious contender for the American Christian mainstream, but it aspires

to a wider impact on American religion and society. Also active in the United States is the

Nigerian-based Redeemed Christian Church of God North America, which claimed six hundred

parishes in the U.S. and Canada in 2011, not to mention others in the Caribbean, South America,

the Middle East, and Australia (www.rccgna.org/The-Church/Origin). Another group of Nigerian

origin is the Deeper Life Bible Church, with an impressive footprint in the eastern half of the

United States (www.deeperlifeonline.org/locations-2/americascaribbeans). Beyond Africa, the

Brazilian institution called the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God landed in New York in

1986 and has added sites around the United States as well as Latin America, Europe, Africa, and

Asia—ninety-six countries in all (www.uckg.org.au/about-us.aspx). All of this activity is

understood by its leaders as “‘part of a divine plan’ to plant churches in the West and bring

spiritual renewal” (Kim 2015: 5) to parts of the world that they believe have become at best

lukewarm in their Christianity and at worst secular and irreligious.

Box 3 The Korean Mission to America

Koreans have been among the most fervent recipients of Christianity, often from American

missionaries. By 2006, Koreans had learned their lessons so well that “South Korea ranked as the

number two missionary-sending country in the world” after the United States (Kim 2015: 2).

Rebecca Kim reports that there were almost 26,000 Korean missionaries in the field in 2013,

operating in 169 countries and obviously not seeking to minister only to the Korean diaspora:

“They want to preach the gospel to Americans, particularly white Americans. Among the top ten

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host countries for Korean missionaries serving in 2000, the United States ranked eighth” (2). Like

other reverse missions, the Korean mission sees the U.S. as a faded Christian society, “full of

nominal Christians without substance” (4). Also like many other reverse missions and Jenkins’

New Christendom, they bring “an intense, biblical, and conservative evangelical faith and

practice” shaped by their indigenous culture and history—in this instance, “indigenous Korean

culture and ‘the underside of history’” (6). For that reason Kim dubs them “hyper-Korean

evangelicals” whose style is yet “also supported by a Confucian-influenced hierarchical,

conformist, and military-like organizational system that pushed them to give their all and to

engage in aggressive evangelism” (6). Focusing on an outfit called University Bible Fellowship,

“an international evangelical campus ministry that focuses on world campus mission” with over

1,400 missionaries and 105 chapters in the United States (19), Kim argues that “much of the

enthusiasm to ‘save’ and revitalize America was part of mid-twentieth-century Koreans’ drive for

personal and national uplift—to change from ‘rice Christians’ into history makers” (16) and to

prove themselves the equal of America. Interestingly, despite their unique culture and their

inherent critique of American Christianity, Kim already finds that Korean missionaries have

“turned to the popular white American evangelical megachurches for models and guidance. They

began mimicking contemporary white American evangelical worship styles and ways of

organizing and tried to tone down their intensity. They tried to act more like a ‘normal’ American

evangelical church” (18).

ANTHROPOLOGY OF AMERICAN NON-CHRISTIAN RELIGIONS

As our opening statistics illustrated, most Americans identify with some version of Christianity,

although this field of Christianities is incomprehensibly diverse and becoming ever more so. At

the same time, a not inconsiderable number of Americans ascribe to other religions, and a

reasonable answer to the question, “What religions are in America?” is “All of them.” However,

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in this section, and anthropologically, we are interested not only in non-Christian religions in

America but American non-Christian religions, that is, other religions besides Christianity in the

United States that have “made a home” in the society and that have become identifiably

American in the process.

American African Religion

Some of the earliest non-Christian religions arrived in North America with African immigrants

and slaves, and African religions have continued to arrive ever since. Jane Parish recently

described how Akan people of Ghana blend their witchcraft beliefs with modern life in New York

City, where especially the young immigrants embrace America’s “celebrity fetishism and will do

almost anything to pursue their dream and achieve wealth and fame” (2013: 7). This “almost

anything” includes visiting anti-witchcraft shrines erected around the city, since the ambitious

young Akans “have deduced that witchcraft is ‘a hidden, dark force’ that is preventing them from

becoming rich and famous…. The shrine is also a place that can feed them ‘the secret celebrity

gossip’ necessary in their eyes to give them a competitive edge over their rival and provide them

with the means by which to do this once the witch has been eradicated” (8).

Other African religions have recently penetrated the United States, after a long history of flowing

to and mixing with beliefs in the Caribbean. For example, Robin Poynor analyzes the

construction of altars to the famous Yoruba god of iron, Ògún, in south Florida. In Poynor’s

account, a contingent of African Americans began exploring African religions in the 1950s and

1960s, as a result of which Walter Eugene King founded first the Order of Damballah Hwedo in

New York and then in 1959 the Sango Temple and in 1960 the Yoruba Temple. In 1970 some of

the members relocated to South Carolina, where they founded Oyotuniji, “a Neo-Yoruba

community” based on “an American version of the Yoruba culture of Nigeria,” with King

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declaring himself oba or king in 1972. Eventually a faction moved on to Gainesville, Florida and

then Miami. Interestingly, trips to Nigeria by movement leaders re-established contact with the

“homeland” of Ògún, but the multi-religious culture of Miami also brought “contention among

various òrìsà -related groups such as Santería, Lucumi, and Oyotunji, along with Haitian Vodou

followers. These ideologies produce a religious environment of competition and sometimes

aggression” (22), which is reflected in the contrasting character of the shrines in rural or urban

settings.

In the contentious urban atmosphere, Ògún’s face must be one of strength and defiance,

harsh and intimidating, because the òrìsà is called upon to protect against real and imagined

evils and hostilities. In the Miami shrine, Ògún is the frightening lord of war and the

terrifying protector. In the [rural] Hawthorne shrines, by contrast, Ògún is the maker of

civilization, the preparer of the way. Here objects include saws, pickaxes, hammers, shovels,

rakes, posthole diggers, hoes, an iron furnace, chains, wheels, railroad spikes and rails—in

other words, objects of production and civilization.

(23)

Among the many religions that were born on American soil is the African-related practice that

Zora Neale Hurston described in her hundred-page article as “hoodoo.” Hoodoo, like the more

familiar voodoo or Vodou, she contended, derived from the West African word juju, but among

African Americans it was and is also called simply “conjure” (1931: 317). Hoodoo beliefs and

practices

are found wherever any number of Negroes are found in America, but conjure has had its

highest development along the Gulf coast, particularly in the city of New Orleans and in the

surrounding country. It was these regions that were settled by the Haytian [sic] emigrees

[sic] at the time of the overthrow of French rule in Hayti [sic] by L’Overture…. They

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brought with them their hoodoo rituals, modified of course by contact with white civilization

and the Catholic church, but predominantly African.

(318)

Naturally the Afro-Caribbean traditions absorbed local African American elements, including in

New Orleans “herbs, reptiles, insects” and “the altar, the candles, the incense, the holy water, and

blessed oil of the Catholic church”; in Florida, though, “no use is made of such paraphernalia.

Herbs, reptiles, insects, and fragments of the human body are their stock in trade” (318).

Also incorporated into Hoodoo was “spiritualism”: “The dead and communication with the dead,

play traditionally a large part in Negro religions” (319). Katrina Hazzard-Donald recently found

hoodoo alive but inevitably changing in the twenty-first century. She dubs it “the folk, spiritual

controlling, and healing tradition originating among and practiced primarily, but not exclusively,

by captive Americans and their descendants primarily in the southern United States” (2013: 2). It

is extremely syncretistic, “heavily influenced by Native American custom, knowledge, and

tradition” (7) as well of course as by Euro-Christianity. Classic hoodoo involved dance, healing

practices, amulets and charms, and plant medicine, but she also complains that “old tradition

black belt Hoodoo” competes today with “‘marketeered’ or ‘snake-oil Hoodoo’” (15), a modern

(and in her eyes largely inauthentic) form that turns to “the curio shop, the mail-order

marketplace, and Hoodoo mail-order catalogs for supplies” (157). The influx of new

practitioners, outsiders, and perhaps charlatans has even led to the formation of the National

African Religion Congress (www.narcworld.com/home.html) as, according to its website, “the

certifying board for priests and priestesses of African-based religion worldwide.”

American Hinduism and Buddhism

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Hinduism and Buddhism are quintessentially “Eastern” religions to most Americans, but they are

just as much global religions, since migrants and gurus have carried them around the world, as

documented in Pratap Kumar’s (2013) recent edited volume, which disappointingly does not

include one chapter drafted by an anthropologist. Even so, two of the essays deal with the United

States, describing for instance the Hindu American Religious Institute

(haritemple.org/hari/default.aspx ) in rural Pennsylvania, the Washington Kali Temple

(www.kalitemple-washington.org), a Bengali Hindu center in suburban Maryland, the Vedanta

Center of Greater Washington DC, and the Nepali Hindu community in southern California.

The United States was not only introduced to Hinduism and Buddhism in the late nineteenth

century but helped to introduce those religions to the rest of the world—and to shape those

religions, even for the people who already practiced them—through the Theosophical Society,

founded by Russian immigrant Helena Blavatsky and American Henry Steel Olcott in New York

City in 1875. The pair relocated to India in 1880 where they promoted their understanding of

Hinduism and Buddhism in India and Sri Lanka. Equally influential for spreading Hinduism in

the U.S. was the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, which featured a visit by

Swami Vivekananda as an emissary of the Ramakrishna Mission, advocating the Vedanta

teachings of Hinduism. Vivekananda founded the first Vedanta Society in New York in 1894, and

soon there were thirteen Vedanta centers across the country. Meanwhile, the Zen Buddhist mater

Daisetz Taitaro Suzuki came to America in 1897.

Kirin Narayan described how these early “holy men” were viewed and depicted in the United

States and the wider West. Popular media like National Geographic, he asserted following Arjun

Appadurai (1988), had a tendency “to exoticize, to essentialize, and to totalize” the Hindu “other”

(1993: 480), focusing on the most extreme and bizarre practices and assuming that those

characterized all Hindus. As one 1913 article asserted, “The very spirit of the East, its subtle

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philosophy, the incarnation of its deepest desire, the product of its age-long effort, all are

embodied in the Indian Sadhu [i.e. holy man] and his self-inflicted penance” (quoted 281).

Andrea Jain (a religious studies scholar, not an anthropologist) echoed Narayan’s findings in her

recent study of the popular American pastime of yoga, which was surprisingly “feared and

loathed” (2014: 22) and “deemed a threat to prevailing religious and social orthodoxies” (24)

when it first appeared in the country and slowly evolved into something that was palatable to

Americans if only vaguely reminiscent of actual Hindu practice. A number of Indian and

American figures contributed to Westernizing and mainstreaming yoga in the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries, “salvaging yoga from its reputation as a system of extreme, antisocial

practices and instead establishing its legitimacy as a philosophical, meditational, or ethical

tradition” (28). Vivekananda himself helped facilitate a “yoga renaissance,” and Jain argues that

so-called “postural yoga” (which is only one and hardly the highest form in Hinduism) is a

successor of stretching and relaxing techniques that were already part of Western culture at the

time. Yoga entered mainstream American culture through the efforts of innovators like B. K. S.

Iyengar and Swami Muktananda, who developed “brands” of popular yoga; they and others like

Krishnamacharya and Sivananda “were the first to associate physical fitness methods and aims

with yoga in the popular imagination by constructing yoga brands and mass-marketing them to

large audiences. With these developments, the aims of postural yoga in the popular imagination

came to include modern conceptions of physical fitness, stress reduction, beauty, and overall

well-being” (76).

Meanwhile, anthropologists have offered two kinds of studies of American Hinduism, one

focusing on South Asian immigrants and the other on Americans adopting and adapting the

religion. In the first category, Hemalatha Ganapathy-Coleman (2013) researched parenting among

first-generation Indian immigrants and their efforts to perpetuate Hindu culture in their children.

As discussed in Chapter 12, Jessica Falcone (2012) reports on Hindutva (nationalist Hindu)

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summer camps, where youths encounter militant Hindu culture even as parents often become

more militantly Hindu than they were before they emigrated from India. The edited volume by

John Zavos et al. (2012) happily features eleven anthropologists in its thirty-two chapters on

contemporary “public” Hinduism, the vast majority writing on the United States, with essays on

Hindu reactions to portrayals in California textbooks, Bhutanese Hindu refugees, the

Bochasanwasi Shri Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS) community in New

Jersey, and Hindu activism in the form of the organization called American Hindus Against

Defamation.

In the second category, one of the most well-known versions of American Hinduism is the

International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), better—but less accurately—known

as Hare Krishnas. Jeanne Daner did a short ethnography of the ISKCON movement in the United

States in 1976, which was then and remains characterized by young white converts. Much more

recently, Scott Lowe (a religious studies scholar) chronicled the small town of Fairfield, Iowa

which “became the de facto center of the Transcendental Meditation Movement in the U.S.” in

1975 (2010: 81) when thousands of practitioners resettled there, constituting twenty percent of the

population. Interestingly, many of these spiritual seekers also “had backgrounds in business, and

a surprising number proved themselves to be remarkably creative, finding and exploiting niches

traditional businesses had overlooked” (85) and bringing economic vitality to the area, including

a housing boom for homes compatible with Transcendental Meditation lifestyles. Finally, the

contributors to the volume edited by Ann Gleig and Lola Williamson (2013), none of whom are

anthropologists, explicitly deal with the evolution of American Hinduism in the careers of major

“homegrown gurus” like Ram Dass, Rudi, Amrit Desai, Sandra Barnard, and others, who have

taken Hinduism in many different—but distinctly American—directions.

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If anything, Buddhism has received an even more welcome reception in the U.S. than Hinduism,

as documented in Richard Hughes Seager’s (1999) Buddhism in America. Buddhism, like

Hinduism, began as an immigrant religion from East Asia, but Anne Spencer (a religious studies

scholar like Seager) posits that the old division between immigrant or “heritage” Buddhist

congregations and “convert” congregations filled by Euro-Americans cannot be maintained: the

Buddhist Churches of America (BCA) “no longer fits easily into either Heritage or Convert

categories, suggesting that the Two Buddhisms system in its current form is inadequate for

evaluating U.S. Buddhist groups” (2014: 35). Examining Jodo Shinshu, originally a Japanese

immigrant sect, Spencer calculates that less than two-thirds of its American members are now

Japanese and that, while many temples still run Japanese cultural programs, “the BCA is well into

a process of integrating into the dominant American culture. Most respondents are American-

born and English speaking and most temple activities are primarily in English. Although the

group remains primarily ethnically Asian, especially Japanese, members and participants

demonstrate increasing ethnic diversity” (48).

Anthropologist Sandra Bell investigated a Tibetan Buddhist movement originally founded in

1973 as Vajradhatu International but subsequently renamed Shambala International. The founder,

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, settled in the U.S., where “Western disciples have a tendency to

romanticize the Tibetan ‘tradition.’ What count as everyday aspects of religious knowledge and

practice in the Tibetan cultural area appear in the United States as ‘extra-ordinary’ aspects of the

charismatic community that enable adepts to ‘solidify and mark themselves out against the outer

world as the possessors of esoteric knowledge’” (1998: 58)—what she and others have called

“crazy wisdom.” One branch of Rinpoche’s campaign in America was the Naropa Institute in

Boulder, Colorado, “a college dedicated to the study of Buddhism and other Asian religions, as

well as psychotherapy and the performing arts” (58), along with a local newspaper, Vajradhatu

Sun. Bell traced the rise of the movement and Chogyam Trungpa’s too-typical fall from grace

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after allegations of sex with female members. Upon the master’s death, Osel Tendszin came to

head the community, whose HIV-positive status became a scandal. Around the same time, the

charisma of the former guru was replaced with an institutional structure featuring a Board of

Directors of Vajradhatu, who “became administrators of its financial accounts and managers of its

religious and educational projects” (63).

Ann Gleig shares another equally interesting formation of American Buddhism, the Buddhist

Geeks, “an online Buddhist media company and community that launched in 2007” (2014: 15).

With its electronically equipped audience and punchy TED-style conference format, its wide

range of participants from experienced practitioners and self-identified “complete and utter

newbies,” its interlacing of technological and contemplative discourses, and its heated

discussions of emerging generational differences amongst American Buddhists, the opening

evening of the 2012 Buddhist Geeks conference encapsulated that which marks Buddhist

Geeks as a unique and distinct phenomena in contemporary American Buddhism. Put

simply, it encapsulated the shift from the baby boomer to Generation X and Y, Buddhist

hippies to Buddhist geeks.”

(16)

Not unexpectedly, the group also grew out of the Naropa Institute and two of its former students,

Vincent Horn and Ryan Oelke, who started a podcast in 2007. Gleig notes three themes in the

movement, namely “a fundamental optimism about the impact of technology of Buddhist

practice,” “the contemporary democratization of Buddhism” moving away from the hierarchy and

sectarianism of traditional Buddhism (19), and “a strong sense that Buddhist Geeks represents a

new generation of Buddhists” (21).

Finally, religious studies scholar Charles Brewer Jones performed an analysis of English-

language literature on Buddhism available through a major book seller, Borders, contending that

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“the marketplace exerts a force that distorts (or adapts) Buddhism in such a way as to lead people

to certain conclusions about religious diversity in general” (2007: 214). For instance, among all

the variants and sects of Buddhism, popular writing clearly shows that “Zen, Tibetan, and

Theravada Buddhism have captivated the interests of the non-Asian Buddhist enthusiast” (217),

while ignoring “entire segments of Buddhism” (219). Worse, “the Zen presented in the books

popular with Western audiences might well be unrecognizable to someone from the premodern

East Asian tradition,” since “the kind of Zen he or she would find would be one already adapted

to Western concerns, culture, and sensibilities” (219). In the end, the books that Americans are

likely to buy on Buddhism, an ostensibly Eastern religion, “convey to them an already-

accommodated Buddhism stripped of its distinctively Asian features” (220).

American Judaism and Islam

Jews have been in America virtually as long as Christians have: Jews arrived with the Spanish by

the late 1500s, and a Sephardic Jew named Elias Legarde or Legardo came to Virginia in 1621.

Jews were in Boston and New Amsterdam (later New York) in the 1640s and 1650s, where they

encountered discrimination; in 1687, Shearith Israel, the oldest continuously-operating Jewish

congregation in the United States, was founded in New York.

Despite its long history in the U.S. and its kinship with Christianity, Marcy Brink-Danan

concluded in a survey of the literature that the anthropology of Judaism is primarily “the work of

those anthropologists who themselves claim a Jewish identity” (2008: 680). Among these

anthropologists are Jack Kugelmass, whose The Miracle of Intervale Avenue (1996) was an

ethnography of the Intervale Jewish Center, the last functioning synagogue in the South Bronx,

where the Jewish residents fought to preserve their religion and culture. Kugelmass followed that

book with an edited volume Between Two Worlds: Ethnographic Essays on American Jewry, in

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which he insisted that “for most American Jews, Judaism is practiced less as a religion than as a

cultural lifestyle and a social affiliation” (1988: 5).

Another feature of the anthropology of Judaism noted by Brink-Danan was the fact that “a

dominant segment of ethnographies of Jews and Judaism fall into a category I might call ‘the

anthropology of Jewish memory’ in which the stories, customs, and lifeways of ‘lost’ or

dwindling Jewish communities are catalogued and recreated” (2008: 683). Kugelmass’

ethnography certainly qualifies, as does Barbara Myerhoff’s classic Number Our Days, her

portrayal of the Aliyah Senior Citizens’ Center in southern California, where despite a “sense of

doom” among the elderly Jews she found a “passionate, almost melodramatic” community in

which “ordinary concerns and mundane interchanges are strangely intense, quickly heating to

outburst”: (1978: 7).

Many, many such books on Jewish communities, congregations, and institutions in the U.S. have

been written, not exclusively or mainly by anthropologists. Anthropologist William Mitchell

described the mishpokke or Jewish family club in New York City, including the “cousins’ club”

and the “family circle,” the latter defined as “a group of relatives with common ancestors

organized like a lodge or club with elected officers, dues, regular meetings, and committees”;

such organizations represented “an adaptive responses to preserve…the social integrity of the

immigrant Jewish family” (1978: 11). A decade ago, Moshe Shokeid (2003) provided a unique

glimpse into Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, a gay synagogue in New York’s Greenwich

Village. Non-anthropologists offering ethnographic accounts of Jewish groups include Frida

Kerner Furman’s (1987) study of a Reform synagogue, Rakhmiel Peltz’ (1998) report on

language and identity in an elderly community in South Philadelphia, and Riv-Ellen Prell’s

(1999) portrayal of the “countercultural” Havurah movement. This research reminds us that great

internal diversity reigns within American Judaism, including denominational, national-origin,

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class, and even race variables. These issues are well examined in Dana Evan Kaplan’s (2005)

edited volume The Cambridge Companion to American Judaism, which does not feature one

anthropologist in its twenty-three contributions, although Lawrence Grossman writes a useful

chapter on Jewish denominations and Chaim Waxman adds an essay on patterns of religious

behavior among American Jews.

Finally, underscoring the aforementioned problem of Jewish memory and the Jewish identity of

many scholars of American Judaism, Jack Glazier asserted that an “anthropologist/native” like

himself “in studying the diverse origins and early experiences of Jewish immigrants and their

children thus finds greater subjective value in understanding the past than in investigating the

increasingly monolithic quality of contemporary American Jewish culture” (1989: 17).

Investigating Jews in Indianapolis, he emphasized the origin (Sephardim versus Ashkenazim) and

class differences within the neighborhood, where poorer immigrants from Ottoman-dominated

Balkan areas as well as from Russia and Poland both “shared a class and status antagonism

toward the wealthier Americanized Reform Jews at the same time that they were alienated from

each other through their very distinct little traditions, differences of language, custom, and

history” (19). In a word, American Jews have not shared a single culture or history, although

the dramatic decline of the vernacular languages, Yiddish and Ladino, over the single

generation separating the immigrants and their American-born children represents the most

telling change, since these languages express, both literally and figuratively, the very tone of

Old World traditions. They were, in effect, the cultural vehicles conveying the respective

little traditions of Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews.

(21)

Henry Goldschmidt reinforces this point with his study of Judaism, Israelism, and race in the

Crown Heights district of New York City. He also stresses the vexed nature of Jewish identity

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and history, in which “categories of identity formation such as ‘race,’ ‘religion,’ ‘Blackness,’ and

‘Jewishness’ may be used—often in tandem—as historiographic tools, helping communities lay

claim to contested pasts” (2006: 378). The case in point is Ludavitch Hasidic Jews and various

“Black Hebrew Israelites,” who advance quite different versions of history and identity.

Lubavitchers see Jewishness as an effect of a “godly soul” that is inherited in some mystical and

not entirely genetic or racial way; thus, they “draw no clear connection between Israelite descent

and racial phenotype” (381). On the other hand, there is a congeries of black residents of the

neighborhood—Black Hebrew Israelites and African Jews, not to mention “Rastafarians, Black

Muslims, Afrocentric Christians, secular Black nationalists, and other Black Brooklynites”—who

“may have little interest in being Israelites themselves but nevertheless insist that the ‘real Jews’

were Black” (380). Not surprisingly, Lubavitch Hasidic Jews and Black Hebrew Israelites use

Jewish history and scriptures “in dramatically different ways and tell dramatically different

stories of Israelite history” (382).

On the lighter side, we might quickly mention Eric Silverman’s presentation on Jewish clothing

and bodily styles. He argues effectively and entertainingly that “Jewish clothing materializes a

series of ongoing, irresolvable conversations about identity” of three particular kind: “Jewish

clothing encodes a conversation concerning the roles and privileges accorded men and women in

both the streets and the pews”; “Jewish garments display a conflict between authority and

practice, or ideology and social life”; and “Jewish clothing symbolizes a wide-ranging tension

between what I call ethnic particularism and acculturation” (2013: xvii). The ultimate picture is

“the fluidity and mutability of Jewishness” (211), which is eminently visible in t-shirts,

underwear, and even yarmulkes that bear modern messages like “Jesus Saves, Moses Invests,”

“Notorious Y.I.D.,” “What Would Maimonides Do?” and “Jewtilicious.”

52

There is not an equivalent body of anthropological literature on American Islam, but this will

change, and there are already signs of the change in progress. For instance, two very new

compilations on American Muslims—The Cambridge Companion to American Islam (Hammer

and Safi 2013) and The Oxford Handbook of American Islam (Hadda and Smith 2014)—both

contain contributions by anthropologists (two in the former, three in the latter). At least as

importantly, contrary to what many Americans might think, they declare that there is such a thing

as “American Islam,” that is, that Islam is not entirely a foreign, let alone enemy, religion. As the

editors of the Cambridge volume explain,

American Muslims have indeed forged their own version of Islam (one of many ‘Islams,’

alongside Iranian Islam, Turkish Islam, Egyptian Islam, etc.). This American Islam is at the

same time a vision and a reality on the ground. Muslim communities, discourses, and

practices have had an impact and significantly helped shape the American religious

landscape at least since the 1900s. Conversely, American religion, politics, and culture have

had an even more significant impact on the formulation of Muslim American practices,

institutions, politics, and communities. The title “American Islam” implicitly rejects the

assumption that Muslims are somehow a temporary or simply migratory phenomenon in

America, as implied in terminology such as “Muslims in America” or “Islam in America.”

(Hammer and Safi 2013: 9)

Like Judaism, Islam has been in North America longer than most Americans imagine, although it

is tragically tied together with African slavery. A Moroccan slave may have been with the

Spanish explorers who set foot in present-day Texas in 1528, and there were Muslims among the

many Africans who were transported to the American colonies as slaves—as much as 15-20% of

those unhappy people. Thus, Islam in America cannot be separated from race in America. A

Sudanese immigrant named Satti Majid founded the Muslim Union Society in New York around

1904, which led to other organizations like Sheik Daoud Ahmed Faisal’s Islamic Mission of

53

America in 1924. However, American-born blacks also appropriated Islam as early as the

Moorish Science Temple, opened by Noble Drew Ali in 1913 in Newark, New Jersey. Marcus

Garvey of the “back to Africa” movement was also influenced by Dusé Muhammad Ali, who

started the Universal Islamic Society in Detroit around 1926. The main event, however, was the

formation of the Nation of Islam sometime in 1930 or 1933, depending on the source. The key

figures were Wallace Ford, renamed Fard Muhammad, and Elijah Muhammad. Under Elijah

Muhammad and later Malcolm X (Al Hajj Malik al-Shabazz) the Nation of Islam evolved into a

black-nationalist movement rejecting Eurocentric, Christian-centric culture and identity and tying

the African American community to its home continent of Africa and its “true” religion of Islam.

Louis Farrakhan eventually achieved leadership in the Nation of Islam.

After 1960 and the loosening of immigration restrictions, the American Muslim population began

to grow, through both immigration and conversion, and to organize. The Muslim Students

Association (1963), the Islamic Circle of North America, United Muslims of America (1982), and

the Council on American Islamic Relations (1994) are among such groups. The majority of

American Muslims today are African Americans, but many are immigrants and their descendants

from other countries, including Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey; recently, a good

number of white Americans have also joined the religion. So, race is not a defining feature of

American Islam.

Interestingly but predictably, also like Judaism, much of the fieldwork on American Islam has

been conducted by Muslims. Jamillah Karim (not an anthropologist) made an ethnographic study

of African American and South Asian immigrant Muslims in two U.S. cities, Chicago and

Atlanta, to explore the relationship between race, class, and gender and to highlight the multiple

Muslim identities practiced in the country. Anthropologist Zain Abdullah’s Black Mecca is a

report on the West African Muslims of the famous Harlem district, focusing on three

54

neighborhood mosques but also taking him to “the Harlem Market, African masjids [mosques],

African and African American restaurants, Laundromats, apartment stoops, celebrations,

community programs, religious services, and the streets” (2010: 9). The book recounts the efforts

of African Muslims—members of two discriminated categories in the United States—“to become

a part ‘of’ Harlem and not merely to dwell ‘in’ it” and reveals that “the various Muslim

establishments that Africans have created do not merely sustain their survival in Harlem. They

have erected an entirely new world” (13). As he concludes, “for all intents and purposes, the area,

by way of its new Black arrivals and Muslim religiosity, has become the new Black Mecca of

Harlem” (13). Abdullah’s current work (see zainabdullah.com), the Temple 25 Project, traces the

history of the principal Nation of Islam temple in Newark, New Jersey.

In the same year as Abdullah’s treatise, anthropologist Akbar Ahmed (2010) published Journey

into America: The Challenge of Islam, based on his and his team’s tour of seventy-five American

cities. This rare large-scale multisited ethnography allows him to interrogate American attitudes

toward Islam, the diversity of Muslims in the U.S., the relations between Islam and other

American religions, and the appeal of Islam to a growing number of white Americans, especially

women.

Abdullah also contributes a chapter, “American Muslims in the Contemporary World: 1965 to the

Present,” to The Cambridge Companion to American Islam. Beginning with the all-important

1965 Immigration Act that opened the door of America for many Muslims, he argues that the

decades since the 1970s have been an era of “Americanizing Islam.”

In 1971, for example, Black Sunni Muslims founded the Islamic Party of North America

(IPNA), which became a multiaffiliate organization. Although the IPNA initially preached a

separatist philosophy, the name of the organization speaks to its national or continental

focus. And by 1975, it was heavily involved in civic engagement such as interfaith forums

55

and community activism. In Philadelphia, white middle-class Americans in search of

spiritual fulfillment helped to found the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship of North America

in 1971. Leading them was a Sri Lankan–born Sui named Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. His

teachings appealed to many Americans in search of religious inspiration, spiritual practice,

and an alternative to a world they perceived as mundane and materialistic. Even the Nation

of Islam (NOI) relinquished its religious and racial separatism, moving toward Sunni Islam

and American integration after 1975. It was eventually renamed the American Muslim

Society.

(Abdullah 2013: 69)

Many further initiatives bridged Islam and American society, such as the Islamic Society of North

America, the American Muslim Alliance, and the American Muslim Council. By these means,

“American Muslims and their institutions underwent a much more deliberate process of

mainstreaming in American society, a process that some have described as Americanization…. In

other words, many American Muslims were in the process of negotiating their American,

transnational, and religious identities, and they continue to do so in the present” (70). Also in the

volume, Su’ad Abdul Khabeer (an anthropologist) and Maytha Alhassen discuss Muslim youth

cultures in the United States, while anthropologist Karen Leonard looks more deeply into Muslim

community groups, networks, and institutions. Many Muslim immigrants, Leonard notes, “are

clearly developing an oppositional culture or a culture of engaged resistance, similar to that of

African American Muslims in the past and present, of Black Protestant churches and Arab

American churches, and of contemporary American Muslim feminists. American Muslims may

feel marginalized and disrespected, yet their engagement with mainstream politics has become

deep and ongoing” (2013: 187).

As a last word, and also like American Judaism only perhaps more so, American Islam is

characterized by extreme national and ethnic diversity, as well as doctrinal or sectarian

56

factionalism. Muslims come to America from a great number of different countries, and more

Muslims are made among the diverse racial and ethnic groups of the United States. Scholar of

global Islam Liyakat Nathani Takim (2009), for instance, documents the national and ethnic

variation of American Shi’ite Muslims; national/ethnic groups are likely to own national/ethnic

mosques and organizations. And in brand-new research, anthropologist Ahmed Afzal describes

the Pakistani Muslim community in Houston, Texas, arguing persuasively that “the homogeneity

attributed to Muslim Americans and South Asians has obscured the increasingly important role of

Islamic sectarian ideologies in shaping community formations in the West” (2015: 8).

Box 4 Paganistan: A Pagan Community in Christian-Majority America

Despite the fact that paganism is discussed in Chapter 9 of Introducing Anthropology of Religion,

it bears one last look because it is such a fascinating and dynamic part of the American religious

scene. Anthropologist Murphy Pizza documents a pagan community in Minneapolis/St. Paul,

Minnesota that self-consciously calls itself “Paganistan.” Experience has shown that non-

traditional religions (and non-religious movements like humanism and atheism) often have a hard

time maintaining their momentum and holding on to their members. Pizza finds, significantly,

that “the forces that typically pull religious communities apart—theological differences, personal

disagreements, differences in practices, status-seeking and undermining authority—are embraced

in Paganistan and are somehow transformed into a unifying energy that makes the community

larger and stronger” (2014: 5). Also more self-consciously and successfully than many religious

or non-religious groups, the pagans of Minneapolis practice “active myth-making” in two senses

of the term. First, the history and lore of the community are overtly managed as “aids in the

construction of identity” (30). Second, the Minnesota pagans, like many American pagans,

encourage creativity in their rituals and diversity in their doctrines and beliefs (if we may speak of

“pagan doctrines and beliefs” at all). Since “no one’s experience is believed to be more authentic

57

than another’s,” then “room is left for practitioners to believe in what they do, as well as to adopt,

innovate, and create ritual forms as needed” (51). And pagans do continuously innovate their

rituals and other practices: “Rituals are designed, collaborated on, rehearsed, performed—but

there is no expectation of rituals being repeated faithfully exactly as they were done the first time.

Instead, the template, the tropes and the reasons for doing them are passed on, and the ritual

details—invocations, blocking, garb, magical workings—are expected to change and be updated

every year” (98). Last but not least, the citizens of Paganistan are not expected to adopt exclusive

and competing identities or memberships (and would not tolerate it if they were asked to).

Instead, pagans practice a kind of “polyaffiliation,” a more or less comfortable belonging to many

different groups simultaneously. This does not mean that all disagreements and hostilities are

avoided, but it does mean that orthodoxy and orthopraxy are less important to them than to most

religions. Yet, one wonders how many of these qualities we might also find in traditional

religions if we looked for them, and how this awareness would alter our perception of religion.

CONCLUSION

The United States is a religious society, but we might better say that it is a society of religions, a

vast field of religious ideas, identities, and institutions, a sea of swirling religious currents. No

one religion is the “true” American religion nor is or could be representative of America’s

religions. The U.S. includes liberal Christians and Christian fundamentalists, Jews, Muslims,

Hindus, Buddhists, pagans (not to mention atheists, agnostics, and secular humanists) and more

sects, denominations, and new religious movements than an army of anthropologists could study

in a lifetime.

The prominent and painful gaps in the coverage of this chapter are partly an effect of its brevity

but also of the relative disinterest that anthropologists have paid to American society generally

58

and American religion specifically. This is changing for the better, though. More importantly,

anthropologists—and other social scientists adopting ethnographic methods—have shown that the

anthropological perspective on American religion is a valuable and indeed a necessary one. The

present chapter has proven that American religion, like all religion, is constructed, more or less

culturally consonant, diverse, practiced, and constantly evolving. Religion is also entangled with

other variables—politics, gender, race, class, and so forth. We have only touched the surface of

the complex and dynamic field of American religion; the chapter is as much a call for serious

anthropological engagement with American religion as a survey of its past accomplishments.

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