Practical And Cultural Similarities In American Religion
Despite the differences among the many religious groups who have arrived in the United States, and the scholarly assessments of what constitutes “American religion,” some similarities have arisen in both the practice and the study of religion in America. As mentioned earlier, revivalism began as a technique for energizing new religious converts but became a more general method of persuasion used subsequently in the development of mass politics. Ryan (1981) delineated the ways in which revivals shaped both the private and the public spheres, affected the ideas of what constituted the proper middle-class family, and gave women a significant role in societal-level change as well.
Even the organizational forms of religions in America, whether denominational or congregational, are examples of convergence. Processes of “institutional isomorphism” (DiMaggio and Powell 1983) push different organizations toward similar structural forms. The same legal and social forces that encourage pluralism in religious identification also promote an organizational isomorphism among different groups. Groups look alike organizationally even if they differ theologically, politically, and socially. The American experience has been the stage for both diversity and convergence.
At the cultural level, several themes have become common to American religion. Disestablishment and pluralism have produced an ethos of religious voluntarism. For many groups, beginning with evangelical and Holiness traditions but spreading widely, “real” religion involves voluntary submission of the individual will to the “free grace” of God. The “community of saints” was still filled by the elect, but not necessarily a “predestined” elect. Rather, humans must use their free will to come voluntarily to a Godly humility. This worldview placed a primacy on the individual believer. Thus religious requirements for salvation and the individualism implicit in a rationalizing capitalist economy and a mass political democracy all shared an “elective affinity” (Thomas 1989).
Without legal compulsion holding communicants, disaffected church members can leave. Additionally, the variety of acceptable options offered by increasing religious diversity have forced American religious groups to respond to what is essentially a “religious market” to recruit and maintain members (Berger 1979, Finke and Stark 1992). As ethnicity became submerged by geographic and social mobility (especially for European Americans), church switching became easier, more acceptable, and more common. Indeed, from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, a religious populism became firmly ingrained in American religious culture.
This cultural individualism and religious voluntarism also led to a widely shared emphasis on morality over theology. In a diverse society, an often-shared morality allowed a certain ecumenical and interfaith tolerance that glossed theological differences. This “shared” morality was not a neutral, consensual product of an egalitarian society. Practical and public morality has often been the cornerstone of religious conflict as well as civility. Nonetheless, in American life the idea resonates that a shared sense of the moral is not dependent on specific theological underpinnings (Demerath and Williams 1985).
The case for an American religion also resonates with an argument concerning “American exceptionalism.” Exceptionalism has both political and religious dimensions that may be related to efforts to answer such questions as these: Why has there not been a serious socialist challenge in American politics? Why are there continued high levels of religious activity, despite the society’s thorough modernization? Why does religion have the political influence that it does despite disestablishment and pluralism? While debates continue over the details of answers to such questions, there is widespread agreement that the United States is distinct from other industrialized, (post)modern societies. The nation’s religious profile is one aspect of that distinctiveness; America is what it is in large part because of the development of “American religion.”