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This chapter draws together the preceding material to make a case for two fundamental constitutional principles in the law of organized religions. These principles are reflected in the human rights case law and the history of the development of English law. The argument proceeds by rejecting individual rights as inadequate to describe or defend the current law. Two key ideas are clarified: establishment and secularism. Both are found wanting as an appropriate constitutional model. In particular, a dangerous slippage in the law from secularism-as-separation to secularism-as-indifference is highlighted. Instead, the two fundamental constitutional principles are autonomy and neutrality, understood as autonomy on the part of the organized religion and neutrality on the part of the state. Once these are identified and rendered precise it becomes clear that the law of organized religions is — and must remain — located between establishment and secularism.

This chapter discusses the link between happiness and religion. It draws on meaning-and-belonging theory to deduce that a religious affiliation heightens happiness through participation in collective religious rituals. Attendance and engagement appear key: a merely nominal religious affiliation makes people little happier. Notably, two religious foundations of happiness—affiliation with organized religious groups and attendance at services—have fallen. Softened religious engagement, then, may contribute to the slight downturn in general happiness. In fact, steady happiness is reported among those who participate frequently in religious services, but falling levels among those who are less involved. The chapter also considers the association between religion and happiness outside the United States using data from the International Social Survey Program, an international collaborative survey to which the General Social Survey contributes the American data.

Beginning with a discussion of the need for organized religion, the theology and history behind the different forms of Christian ministry are introduced, including the offices (orders) of bishops, priests, deacons, ministers, and the papacy. The history of the ritual of ordination is discussed, as well as the influence of monasticism on the evolution of Christian ministry.

This chapter describes a type of American teenager called the Resisters. These are the teenagers who might be expected to fall into the secular camp because they are not only uninterested in organized religion, but in fact they express a certain amount of vehemence toward organized religion. However, they are very much interested in the supernatural and in interviews they made the boldest statements of beliefs like equating God with aliens. The chapter describes the experiences of a male and female Anglo-American teenager to determine what influenced them to embrace such seemingly idiosyncratic approaches to the supernatural realm.

This chapter examines religion's coding in the television programs Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. It analyzes how these programs refer to organized religion and to the lore of vampires and how they embrace a romantic notion about an individual's need for community and her capacity for transformation. It reviews four episodes and explains how the programs express a postmodern, relativistic approach to religious belief.

Three different types or styles of religion—historic, public, and personal—need to be distinguished in order to understand religion in contemporary America. Historic religion is organized religion (e.g., Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism) in the traditional sense of the term. Public religion refers to the religious dimensions imbedded in the nation’s social norms and public discourse. Personal religion entails the ideas, values, and practices that define individuals as moral and spiritual persons. This chapter articulates two key questions related to each of the three types of religion—one focusing on ideas and the other on practices – that highlight religion’s significance within higher education. The key historic religion questions focus on religious literacy and interfaith etiquette. The public religion questions ask how a given society defines what counts as knowledge and how religious (and secular) practices shape civic engagement. Questions related to personal religion focus on the role of convictions in the teaching and learning process and on how colleges and universities can help students build meaning and purpose into their lives.

This chapter examines the experiences and stories of the so-called Mysticals, American teenagers who have no interest in organized religion yet who are familiar with it. It evaluates the experiences of an Anglo-American female, an African American male, and Anglo-American male. All of these teenagers have had previous experience with conservative Protestantism, but have all abandoned it in their childhood. This chapter analyzes how the differences in racial or ethnic background play a role in the interpretation of supernatural stories and their relationship with alternative spiritualities.

This chapter examines the structure of organized religion in the United States. Two styles of church organization prevail in the United States, the congregational or the hierarchical and “connectional”. These forms of organized religion both rely on membership for their survival. In addition to recruitment, a church must also survive in its local environment, which is always changing as jobs and people move, neighborhoods age, and immigration to the U.S. continues.

Organized religion in the United States is on the threshold of a seismic shift. Today, religious and community leaders are witnessing a crisis in the transmission of religious memory, practice, and tradition to the next generation. In major urban centers across the United States, there is a generalized perception that individuals in their twenties and early thirties constitute a “black hole” in congregational life. Members of the young-adult population are simply missing from most churches, synagogues, and mosques. This chapter presents a study that explores the experiences and attitudes of young adults who are exceptions to the norm—namely, those who are actively participating in congregational life. Based on qualitative interviews and participant observation, the research team constructed profiles of Jewish, Christian (Protestant and Catholic), and Muslim congregations. To explore the intergenerational transmission of faith, they analyzed individuals within an institutional context and the institutions themselves. This research highlights the similarities and differences among and between individuals and congregations across four faith traditions.

This chapter shows how the growing power of organized and barely organized religion in American life extended well beyond the churches as cooperation in benevolent enterprises created any number of mission groups and reform societies. Campaigns against various sins, the desire to build holy communities, and a sense of God's presence in daily life produced not only a willingness to tackle social problems such as alcoholism and poverty but a conviction that such problems could ultimately be solved by human efforts aided by divine grace. Missionary, Bible, tract, and Sunday school societies embodied this organized benevolence: forming committees, raising money, and proselytizing across the nation. Much of this activity reflected expectations about an advancing Kingdom of God in America, a millennial optimism that became ever more prominent as religion assumed a larger role in American society and culture.

This epilogue argues that the meaning of the Enlightenment resides in political structures and personal transformations that emerged in the course of the eighteenth century. These are most visible in the lives and ideas found in its last quarter. Since the late 1680s into the 1790s, all sorts of people tried to break with tradition and find alternatives to absolutism in church and state. By 1800, space and time on earth were filled by fewer miracles, saints, and prophecies than had been the case in 1700. Ultimately, the eighteenth-century philosophes, despite their disagreements, shared a universal distrust of organized religion and the priests who enforced it. Indeed, the century ended with revolutions that focused minds on making new institutions, new laws, new hopes and dreams.

This chapter explores the complex relationship between religiosity and human rights. Publics in Mexico, Morocco, India, and Nigeria are deeply religious, yet human rights practitioners struggle to identify the most effective methods to engage with religious worldviews and institutions. The chapter presents evidence for human rights conceptualizations that are unique to particular religious traditions. For example, Catholics are more likely to have positive associations with human rights than non-Catholics, and Muslims tend to associate “human rights” with “women’s rights” more than non-Muslims. Data also suggest that social religiosity, such as regular attendance in a place of worship, is associated with more negative ideas about human rights, whereas personal religiosity, such as practices of prayer, is linked to more positive ideas. Religion and human rights are strongly linked, but in multidirectional or seemingly contradictory ways, suggesting the need for context- and issue-sensitive future research.

Chapter 1 sets the background by discussing the literature on the role of religion in sociopolitical organization and centralized government. Sociologists, in particular, had much to say about the role of religion and whether or not moral as well as ethical considerations associated with faith serve as a foundation for social stability. A strand within sociology, in fact, has promoted the notion that monotheism was particularly effective in serving this function. Political scientists, on the other hand, honed in on the extent to which ecclesiastical and political power complemented each other in influencing the efficacy of centralized government. They also extensively documented the degree to which religious rivalries or affinities, especially those involving the three major Abrahamic, monotheistic faiths, produced and sustained violent conflicts throughout history. The chapter wraps up with a documentation of some salient historical facts upon which the books’ key arguments are built and those which it seeks to explain.

This concluding chapter contains reflections on scholarly investigations into religion and American culture, arguing that southern gospel as a field of religious thought, action, and feeling asks us to reimagine the concept of “organized religion” as a phenomenon—in this case, a popular music culture—that exists alongside, within, and beyond the church. It envisions a relational dynamic in which evangelical habits of mind and feeling and the expression of feelings shift along lines of individual and collective needs and desires. Furthermore, the chapter briefly delves into and defends the notion of gospel music as a meaningful language for postmodern transcendence.