Search

This introductory chapter presents, as an example of the complexity of contemporary religiosity in Latin America, the lived religion of a woman from Cordoba, Argentina, named Norma—the way in which this regular woman connects with a suprahuman power using different religious venues, in spite of the fact that she identifies as Catholic. Her story shows some of the problems we have in understanding the Latin American religious landscape if we employ theoretical tools that are not appropriate. In order to solve this problem, the chapter explains the methodology used in the book to explore Latin Americans’ lived religion, and the author’s position. The chapter finishes with a description of the book ahead.

The chapter provides a description and analysis of the contemporary phenomenon known as ‘new monasticism’. It examines key figures whose work influenced the rise and development of the movement (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, George MacLeod, Teilhard de Chardin, and Thomas Merton). It offers a typology of new monasticism (conceptual, classical, and contextual) based on the sources on which it draws. It describes the various experiments of monastic living that characterize the different approaches: conceptual (e.g. Rutba House, the Simple Way); classical (e.g. Monasteries of the Heart, Céli Dé); and contextual (e.g. Taizé, Focolare, mayBe, Kumla). And it examines how new monasticism can be situated—socially, culturally, and spiritually—in relation to other contemporary movements in spirituality and ‘lived religion’.

This chapter contextualizes the phenomenon of demonic possession and discusses its medieval interpretations as well as demonstrating its connections to fields of study such as heresy, demonology, and witchcraft. It sets out the main analytical concept of lived religion and shows how demons were integral within it, intersecting cultural, communal, and individual levels. Religion created a performative space and demonic presence was a fluid and multifaceted category within it. This chapter introduces the corpus of source material and methodological elements of canonization processes: the final records were an outcome of collaboration between lay witnesses and the inquisitorial committee, an amalgam of personal choices in the use of rhetoric, communal memories of actual past events, and the demands of canon law and the miracle genre. Therefore, depositions reveal inconsistencies in the universalizing discourse of the Church and manifest local nuances in the way people lived their religion.

This chapter shows how demonic possession was conceptualized as a lived experience of religion and argues that the diabolical had many functions within the miraculous. Lived religion as a methodological tool, a way to read the depositions of canonization processes, displays the way lay people used demons (not vice versa) in singling out and dealing with uncertainties in their lives. Religion-as-lived was built upon corporeal experiences; the performative space religion created was made real for the individual and the community by embodied signs and practices. As a fluid rhetorical resource, demons also facilitated a contribution to the construction of society and culture. The differences between lay and clerical spheres were visible when demonic possession involved female sexuality or the position of the clergy. Geographical differences demonstrate the limits of the Church’s universalizing discourse and challenge strict categorizations concerning gender, the demonic, and even medieval Europe as a single, coherent unity.

The chapter analyses two groups of Eastern Orthodox women in Finland and their relationship to the Mother of God. The analysis is based on sixty-two ethnographic interviews and nineteen written narratives. The focus is on two groups in two marginal contexts within Orthodoxy: women converted from the Lutheran Church and the indigenous Skolt Sámi women in northeastern Lapland (all cradle Orthodox). Both contexts reflect a broader ethno-cultural process of identity formation. The converted women tend to reflect on their image of the Mother of God in relation to their previous Lutheran identity, in which the Virgin Mary plays a marginal role. In Skolt Sámi Orthodoxy, the figure of the Mother of God is less accentuated than St Tryphon, their patron saint. The Orthodox faith and tradition in general have been central for the Skolts in the course of their traumatic history.

Supernatural wizards with magical powers to heal the sick and who inhabit the minds and bodies of men, women, and children, as well as defend religion from the forces of evil: this is not the popular vision of Buddhism. But this is exactly what one finds in the Buddhist country of Myanmar, where the majority of people abide by Theravāda Buddhism—a form of Buddhism generally perceived as staid, lacking religious devotion and elements of the supernatural. Known as “weizzā,” the beliefs and practices associated with this religion have received little scholarly attention, especially when compared with research done on other aspects of Buddhism in Myanmar. Reasons for this are varied, but two stand out. Firstly, because such phenomena have been labeled by scholars and Buddhists alike as “popular” and “syncretic” forms of religion, scholars of Buddhism in Myanmar have tended to focus their research on aspects of Buddhism considered orthodox and normative, such as vipassana and abhidhamma. Secondly, the academic study of religion has been slow to develop new interpretive strategies for studying religious phenomena that do not readily fit existing categories of what constitutes “religion.” These two dilemmas will be confronted by introducing and employing the framework of “lived religion” to examine the religious lives of those who engage the world of Buddhist wizards, as well as the experiences these individuals consider central to their lives—along with the varied rituals that make up their personal religious expressions. The reader is invited to think of religion dynamically, reconsidering the landscape of Myanmar religion in terms of practices linked to specific social contexts. After delineating a genealogy of scholarly approaches to the study of Buddhism-as-lived and the ways in which scholars have constituted the subject of their studies, the article will examine aspects of Myanmar religious life from the perspectives of those whose experiences are often misrepresented or ignored entirely, not only in Western academic works on religion but also in Myanmar historical monographs and other written, oral, and pictorial sources. In addition to increasing our understanding of the lived religious experiences and practices of the weizzā and their devotees, this approach to religious studies also enriches our investigation of the complex interrelationship between these experiences and practices and the wider social world they are enacted in. Acknowledging that any lens we study religion through offers only a partial truth, an improved religious studies approach to the weizzā and similar phenomena can get closer to the truths that people make in their own lives: thus, moving further from the contested boundaries that scholars and practitioners of religion place on religious worlds.

The analysis of journalism and religion emerges from two different research paradigms: a post-positivist and a culturalist. The primary debate in the field stems from the two paradigmatic orientations. Post-positivist journalism and religion research argues that religious topics are already complex and so by simplifying, researchers can help explain the topic for broader consumption. Yet culturalist journalism and religion research argues that there is little to be gained from attempting to simplify religion in this way—it is better to represent religion as it is, rather than to make it palatable. The topic developed in the 1980s largely as a result of contributions from Edward Said, Judith Buddenbaum, Stewart Hoover, Mark Silk, and David Nord. Three primary approaches have become dominant. In effects-oriented research, religion serves as a variable in helping explain a phenomenon. In the culturalist approach, the journalism and religion phenomenon is examined through the lens of structure and agency—the power relations integral to the phenomenon. Finally, in the literary criticism approach, religion is examined as the phenomenon being represented in journalism. As paradigms would indicate, the post-positivist paradigm is most interested in predicting the religious representations and the culturalist paradigm is most interested in understanding the representations. Broadly, this subfield is situated within the larger umbrella of journalism and minority concerns. Implicit in this research is Said’s orientalism, a theoretical tradition that emphasizes the “othering” of minority groups, making them appear as if they are in need of being “oriented” to fit ideas of what is normal and acceptable within a society. It similarly builds on Gramsci’s hegemony, which conversely examines how a society proliferates ideas of that which is normal and acceptable practice.

Popular definitions of religious literacy don’t capture the reality of lived religion in a plural age. Using language as a metaphor for religion, this chapter differentiates between religious fluency among co-religionists and the ability to read and interpret the vocabulary of the “language” of the religious other. Whereas advocates for biblical literacy and world religions courses often reinforce an essentialist understanding of religion that presents only the “standard” version of a language, this chapter suggests an alternative 3B Framework that encourages students to consider how the interrelationship of belief, behavior, and belonging creates religious “dialects.” A pedagogy built around the 3B Framework encourages students to compare and contrast the construction of religious languages in a linguistic mode, analyzing the importance of belief, behavior, and belonging for individuals or communities. This framework opens possibilities for inter-religious dialogue between “multilingual linguists” who can engage the most meaningful aspects of interlocutors’ religious identity.

The history of Protestantism in America is deeply intertwined with the histories of race and religious pluralism. Protestantism grew out of Martin Luther’s remonstrations against the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th century, and swiftly divided into a multiplicity of denominations and sects that spread across Europe, the Americas, and eventually the rest of the world. Luther believed that individuals gained salvation through God’s grace rather than through good works and that saved individuals belonged to the “priesthood of believers” and thus enjoyed direct access to God through their faith in Jesus Christ. Despite the significant differences that existed between Protestant denominations and sects, they shared these basic beliefs that salvation came through faith in Jesus Christ, that believers had an individual relationship with God, and that the Bible rather than a priest was the highest earthly authority. The Protestants who made their way from Europe to the Americas during the early 17th century derived from different denominational branches, including Puritans, Anglicans, Huguenots, Quakers, Lutherans, Anabaptists, and others, and came for diverse reasons, with some seeking an escape from religious persecution and others eager to reap a profit in the New World. They arrived to a vast continent that already boasted a multiplicity of peoples and religions, including indigenous Americans, French and Spanish Catholics, Jews, and Africans. Through their interactions with non-Protestant and non-European peoples, Protestants drew on their religious beliefs to make sense of the differences they perceived between themselves and those they encountered, defining and redefining the relatively new concept of “race” in the process. As Protestants established their faith as the dominant cultural, religious, and ideological force in North America, they used their religiously inflected definitions of race to create racial and religious hierarchies, enshrining white Protestantism at the apogee of these invented categories. These hierarchies influenced American law, politics, and culture from the colonial era onward. They delineated which peoples counted as “American” and who could and should possess the full rights granted to U.S. citizens in the decades and centuries after the American Revolution. These hierarchies, coupled with religious ideas such as the Protestant commitment to spreading the gospel, also shaped the transcontinental and international expansion of the nation, providing the impetus and justification for exerting hegemonic control over indigenous populations within and outside of the United States. At the same time, Protestant beliefs about freedom and the inherent dignity of the individual provided an ideological basis for African Americans, Latinx Americans, indigenous Americans, and a range of immigrant populations to resist subjugation. Constitutional guarantees of religious freedom and the separation of church and state created the opening for true religious pluralism. The diversity and evolution of American Protestantism and Protestant thought, as well as the role that Protestantism played in shaping and contesting American ideas about race and religion, influenced the development of American society and politics profoundly.

Communicating about climate change with religious groups should recognize the diversity incorporated in the term “religion.” Diversity in practice, institutional forms, belief systems, values, and core narratives mean that climate communication cannot be formulaic application of communication techniques and social psychology tweaked for spirituality. Because all people see phenomena like climate change through the prisms of their existing ideas, values, influence of significant others, sociostructural position, and personal experience, and expect these to be respected, communication with religious groups should respect the particular religious tradition and draw on narratives and language that are meaningful to the particular faith. Emphasis is placed on the role of religion as a social space wherein people come together, form ideas, and act collectively. Social networks and established practice are likely to be as significant as the influence of a religious leader although such elite influence can also be important. Roman Catholic Pope Francis’ recent teaching document on the environment, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, serves as one example of communication about climate change. An understanding of the cultural assumptions, narratives, and framings relevant to a particular group is essential regardless of whether the people are secular or religious.

This chapter examines one of the most contested elements of Hegel’s corpus, his mature treatment of religion in his Berlin Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Emphasizing the need to approach the lectures in context, this chapter first situates Hegel’s philosophy of religion within his larger philosophical project. Doing so both illuminates why the material’s significance has been so debated and highlights what should and should not be assumed at the outset of the lectures. Paying careful attention to Hegel’s structuring of the project, the chapter works through his treatments of the concept of religion, cognition of the absolute, religious practice, the history of religions, and Christianity. The analysis of part two of the lectures, Determinate Religion, closely examines Hegel’s conception of the manifestation of religion. The treatment of the Christian cultus, or community, stresses the connection Hegel develops (by 1827) between this community and modern social and political life.

This chapter surveys scholarly writing about the intersection of religion and sport in the United States and Britain. It reviews the dominant historiography of works on religion and athletics, arguing that historians have focused primarily on clergy within Protestant traditions and the question of whether specific sports were considered licit or illicit in different places and times. This perspective occludes consideration of Catholic and other religions, the historical importance of bloodsport, and the informal nature of the interrelationship of religion and sport in daily life. The chapter also examines approaches to sport in scholarship from religious studies, highlighting the ways that scholars of religion have imagined sport as a form of religion (or “natural religion,” civil religion), often taking the perspective of the spectator and fan. The chapter concludes by exploring newer modes of analysis that explore the body as a site where religion and sport intersect.

This chapter explores how increasingly diverse and democratic societies reconcile issues of religion and secular education in public schooling, focusing on the American and European public school systems. It addresses ongoing legal conflicts in education and religion and explores some recent US Supreme Court and European Court of Human Rights decisions in this arena. In particular, it discusses the issues involved in the relationship between secular and religious conceptions in public schooling as well as exploring the increasingly controversial themes of religious symbolism, religious curricula content, neutrality, and secularism in public schooling. The chapter concludes with discussion of issues related to the tendency of some domestic courts and national legislators to secularize the meaning of religious symbols and the application of principles of secularism to determine neutrality in the educational field.

The Christian gospel message was intended to be public. The biblical basis for this is undisputable. Yet in recent times the visibility of the Christian perspective on issues affecting society that are often debated in the public sphere has declined in many Western societies. In “Sociology and Theology Reconsidered: Religious Sociology and the Sociology of Religion in Britain,” John Brewer states that “religion has tended to be restricted to the private sphere” in many modern nation-states over the 20th century, meaning public displays of religiosity have been frowned upon and strictly limited. The privatization of religion is a result of a decline in the importance of religion in modern societies, a process termed “secularization.” Yet the idea of increasing secularization in society is not accepted by all. Despite common-sense notions that such societies have become increasingly secular in nature, Christian values do still clearly underpin the nature and functioning of institutions of the state and government in many Western nation-states. Bryan Turner states in “Religion and Contemporary Sociological Theories” that since the late 20th century at least, there has actually been a “growing recognition of the importance of religion in public life”, something José Casanova termed “public religion.” The sociologist Peter Berger suggested that we began to witness the “desecularization” of the world in the late 20th century as there has been (and continues to be) a global resurgence in religious adherents. This situation was evident most considerably in the rapid growth of Christianity across the globe throughout the 20th century, a phenomenon that continues to gather momentum into the 21st century.

Between the 16th and 18th centuries, the Inquisition in New Spain tried individuals for a broad range of sacrilegious acts against religious objects, including spitting, trampling, stabbing, and breaking them to pieces. Men and women also desecrated images through verbal insults, irreverent gestures, and even sexual acts. In most of these cases, the term sacrilege does not adequately reflect the often-complex motivations behind such actions. The Protestant iconoclastic violence of the 16th century unleashed on Catholic sacred images has made us think of acts of sacrilege as primarily directed at denying the power of images and their ability to represent divinity. Yet even seemingly obvious cases of iconoclasm in New Spain challenge this assumption. In many and possibly most cases, such actions betrayed the longing of men and women for spiritual closeness with divinity. The anger, desperation, and desolation sacrilegists sometimes expressed were not always unlike the ardent emotions that sacred images could elicit from devout Catholics. At other times, men and women sought to appropriate the power of sacred images and relics for reasons that challenge an easy distinction between religious and superstitious intentions. Taken together, cases of sacrilege, blasphemy, desecration, irreverence, profanation, and superstition can therefore reveal the variety and creativity of authorized and unauthorized religious practices in colonial Spanish America.

Athletic events occur in discrete locations, played by individuals following a prescribed set of rules, leaving behind metrics like wins and losses, final scores, and overall records. So on the surface, the empirical facts of sports are rather mundane. And yet, for devoted participants and observers, physical movements and calculated numbers feed into carefully constructed worlds of mythic stories, potent symbols, and exuberant rituals. The story of religion and sports in America, then, starts with bodies in motion. It continues as these bodies become inscribed with sacred meaning, each mark bearing the traces of a given population’s most cherished values. Institutional religions have been part of this story. From the “muscular Christians” of the Progressive Era to a contemporary Muslim football team observing the Ramadan fast during a playoff run, Americans have habitually turned playing fields into praying fields. Sports have also figured into the making of America’s civil religious discourse, as athletic expressions of national identity. In these instances, bodies in motion have reinforced or disrupted the boundaries that separate “real” Americans from those perceived to threaten social stability. Beyond institutional and civil religions, though, religious themes and ideas continue to attach themselves to sports in new and innovative ways. Understanding this process requires an unbraiding of the category of “religion” from notions of “God” and “belief.” Instead, we profit from an understanding of religion that starts with embodied movements, and continues into the material production of the sacred. From here, sports become locations to experiment with, and experience, what it means to be human. And this is where the attraction to sports originates, both in the past and in the present.

The phrase Religious Right refers to a loose network of political actors, religious organizations, and political pressure groups that formed in the United States in the late 1970s. Also referred to as the Christian Right, representative organizations associated with the movement included Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, Tim LaHaye’s Council for National Policy, Beverly LaHaye’s Concerned Women for America, and Ed McAteer’s Religious Roundtable. Leaders and organizations associated with the Religious Right made a broad-based religious appeal to Americans that emphasized traditional family values, championed free-market economics, and advocated a hardline foreign policy approach to the Soviet Union. They also criticized secular and materialistic trends in American culture that many in the Religious Right associated with the moral and economic decline of the nation. The organizations of the Religious Right had a major influence on the 1976 and 1980 presidential elections by directly affecting the political fortunes of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Although many of the organizations declined and disbanded in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, some of the organizations of the Religious Right persisted into the 2000s and continue to shape policy discussions, drive voter turnout, and influence religious and political life in the United States. Even though actors in the Religious Right appealed broadly to the conservative cultural sensibilities of Americans from Protestant, Catholic, Mormon, and Jewish backgrounds, the movement most capably mobilized white evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. The decentralized nature of white evangelical Protestantism means that organizers associated with the Religious Right mobilized coalitions of activists and rank-and-file members from large conservative denominational bodies such as the Southern Baptist Convention, the Presbyterian Church in America, and the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church, while also drawing support from independent churches associated with Reformed, Pentecostal, charismatic, and nondenominational Protestantism. Further, the term Religious Right has also been used by scholars and journalists alike to identify a broad ecumenical coalition of activist Catholics, Mormons, Jews, and other cultural conservatives who have made common cause with Protestants over social issues related to sexual morality—including resisting abortion rights, combating pornography, and fighting against rights for homosexuals—since the 1970s. Scholars often trace the roots of the Religious Right to the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy, a series of theological and institutional disputes that split conservative Protestants in the early 20th century. In the intervening decades between the 1920s and 1970s, conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists developed an institutional subculture of churches, colleges, and voluntary societies that created a popular perception of their withdrawal and isolation from mainstream social and political culture in the United States. This institutional separation, however, did not stop conservative Protestants from contributing to many of the most important political controversies of the 20th century, including debates over cultural change, economic theory, and foreign policy during the Cold War. By the late 1970s, a unique convergence of social changes and new developments in law, politics, and media led to the emergence of a distinct coalition of special interest political groups that have since been labeled the Religious or Christian Right. These groups had a profound effect on electoral outcomes and public policy debates that has persisted well into the 21st century.

Space is a basic yet complex dimension in American religion. Historically and historiographically, conceptually and in practice, it has been central to believers’ experiences of what they consider “sacred” and to the models that scholars have developed to understand religious practices in the United States. First assumed as an unexamined given by 19th-century scholars, it became recognized as an explanatory factor in its own right during the 20th century and was the focus of ongoing modern and postmodern attempts at conceptualization from the mid-20th century into the early 21st. Until the late 20th century, work in American religious studies conceptualized space as an objectively existing container for human activity, and scholars considered a presumed abundance of it a defining determinant of American religious experience. Church historians prior to the mid-20th century typically argued that the vastness and relative isolation of American space, initially subsumed under the historiographic idea of an American “frontier,” allowed the development of uniquely American religious freedom and revivalism. Although the frontier thesis was challenged during the latter half of the 20th century, the concept of space persisted and proved useful as U.S. religious historians gave increasing attention to pluralism, urban experience, transnationalism, and everyday practice. Religion scholars and anthropologists, meanwhile, proposed from the early 20th century that religious practice involved fundamental spatial distinctions between sacred and profane, inside and outside, center and periphery, and up and down that provided believers with a sense of social, geographic, and cosmic orientation. By the 1970s and 1980s, cultural theorists began conceiving of space as a subjective experience, a situationally located social and cultural construction “produced” through active efforts at definition, appropriation, and control by human beings. According to this newer conceptualization, space comes into being as an inherently contested medium as believers make specific and concrete the meanings of their beliefs through rituals, relationships, and symbols and create distinct physical and geographically located manifestations of their belief systems. This new approach sparked a “spatial turn” that extended across the humanities and social sciences and moved spatial analysis to a central position in American religious studies. Attention to the spatial dimensions of religious practice generated fruitful research on and new studies of churches and other built environments, American “civil religion,” domestic religious practice, urban religion, the dynamics of pluralism, immigrant communities, and global diasporas. The spatial turn has also generated new concepts of space as scholars attuned to postmodern and transnational experiences have rejected standard emphases on spatial separation and fragmentation in favor of an emphasis on continuity and interconnection.

Dynamic and creative exchanges among different religions, including indigenous traditions, Protestant and Catholic Christianity, and Islam, all with developing theologies and institutions, fostered substantial collective religious and cultural identities within African American communities in the United States. The New World enslavement of diverse African peoples and the cultural encounter with Europeans and Native Americans produced distinctive religious perspectives that aided individuals and communities in persevering under the dehumanization of slavery and oppression. As African Americans embraced Christianity beginning in the 18th century, especially after 1770, they gathered in independent church communities and created larger denominational structures such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and the National Baptist Convention. These churches and denominations became significant arenas for spiritual support, educational opportunity, economic development, and political activism. Black religious institutions served as contexts in which African Americans made meaning of the experience of enslavement, interpreted their relationship to Africa, and charted a vision for a collective future. The early 20th century saw the emergence of new religious opportunities as increasing numbers of African Americans turned to Holiness and Pentecostal churches, drawn by the focus on baptism in the Holy Spirit and enthusiastic worship that sometimes involved speaking in tongues. The Great Migration of southern blacks to southern and northern cities fostered the development of a variety of religious options outside of Christianity. Groups such as the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam, whose leaders taught that Islam was the true religion of people of African descent, and congregations of Ethiopian Hebrews promoting Judaism as the heritage of black people, were founded in this period. Early-20th-century African American religion was also marked by significant cultural developments as ministers, musicians, actors, and other performers turned to new media, such as radio, records, and film, to contribute to religious life. In the post–World War II era, religious contexts supported the emergence of the modern Civil Rights movement. Black religious leaders emerged as prominent spokespeople for the cause and others as vocal critics of the goal of racial integration, as in the case of the Nation of Islam and religious advocates of Black Power. The second half of the 20th century and the early 21st-first century saw new religious diversity as a result of immigration and cultural transformations within African American Christianity with the rise of megachurches and televangelism.

This chapter reexamines the historical origins of nationalism and offers two conclusions. It reveals the saliency of religion by establishing the centrality of the Protestant Reformation and the complexity of its influence on the rise of nationalism. Different attitudes among leaders of the Reformation toward the religious and political shape of the nation exhibit conflicting tendencies toward liberalism and illiberalism that have become central to the study of nationalism, and they help explain why the conflicts are so deep-seated and persistent. The reexamination also reveals some significant intellectual resources for reevaluating and correcting our understanding of liberal nationalism, which holds that nations developing robust liberal political and economic institutions in an orderly manner contribute to peace while those lacking such institutions do not.

The South still commonly appears as the land of the Bible Belt, of evangelical Protestant hegemony. Despite the rapidly increasing immigration from all parts of the world to the region, there is still justification for such a view. To study religion in the South, then, is to examine the influence of a dominant evangelical culture that has shaped the region’s social mores, religious minorities (including Catholicism, Judaism, and non-Christian immigrant religions), cultural forms, charged racial interactions, and political practices. In no other widely dispersed region, save for the Mormon regions of the Rocky Mountain West, does one family of religious belief and expression hold such sway over so many people and throughout such a large area. The biracial nature of evangelicalism in the South, as well, lends it a distinctive history and culture that alternately puzzles, repulses, and fascinates outsiders. The South may be the Bible Belt, but, like Joseph’s coat, it is a belt of many colors, embroidered with a rich stitching together of words, sounds, and images from the inexhaustible resource of the scriptures. The rigid Bible Belt conservatism associated with the common understanding of religion in the South contrasts dramatically with the sheer creative explosiveness of southern religious cultural expression. Indeed, southern religious influences lay at the heart of much of 20th-century American popular culture. And it contrasts with a rapidly changing contemporary South in which Buddhist retreat centers and Ganesha temples are taking their place alongside Baptist and Methodist churches.

The “economic religions” of the modern age, including Marxism, the American progressive-era “gospel of efficiency,” and the beliefs of the economic mainstream of the second half of the twentieth century, shared the conviction that economic progress—however it might best be achieved—would save the world. In the last decades of the twentieth century, however, economic religion was increasingly challenged by a new secular faith, “environmental religion.” For economic religion, the world of nature is seen as a “natural resource.” Nature is to be put to good use by human beings as an instrument of economic progress. In environmental religion, by contrast, nature is seen as having “intrinsic value” independent of human welfare. Human beings have a fundamental ethical obligation to protect and preserve nature that transcends any economic or other such “anthropocentric” concerns.