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American Religion 1 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 2 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 3 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.” 4 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 5 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 1,296,000 1,770,000 2,804,000 1.2 Other Religions Atheist n/a 902,000 1,621,000 0.7 Agnostic 1,186,000 991,000 1,985,000 0.9 6 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 0.7 liberal faiths Unaffiliated 16.1 Atheist 1.6 Agnostic 2.4 7 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.
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