Interfaith Encounters
by Kate McCarthy
Summary
From its most cosmopolitan urban centers to the rural Midwest, the United States is experiencing a rising tide of religious interest. While terrorist attacks keep Americans fixed on an abhorrent vision of militant Islam, popular films such as The Passion of the Christ and The Da Vinci Code make blockbuster material of the origins of Christianity. The 2004 presidential election, we are told, was decided on the basis of religiously driven moral values. A majority of Americans are reported to believe that religious differences are the biggest obstacle to world peace.
Beneath the superficial banter of the media and popular culture, however, are quieter conversations about what it means to be religious in America today.
Written in engaging and accessible prose, this book provides an important reassessment of the problems, values, and goals of contemporary religion in the United States. It is essential reading for scholars of religion, sociology, and American studies, as well as anyone who is concerned with the purported impossibility of religious pluralism.
Excerpt
The volume of American conversations about religion has perhaps never been higher. Both the frequency and the stridency of references to religion in national discourse—from talk radio to popular films to media analyses—have been turned up high. Terrorist attacks keep us fixed on an abhorrent version of militant Islam. The Passion of the Christ and The DaVinci Code make blockbuster material (and controversy) of the origins of Christianity. The best-selling Left Behind novels do the same for the apocalyptic visions at the other end of the New Testament. The 2004 presidential election, we are told, was decided by religiously driven moral values. A majority of Americans are reported to believe that religious differences are the biggest obstacle to world peace. But beneath all this noise are quieter conversations about what it means to be religious in America today—conversations among recent immigrants about how to adapt their practices to life in a new land; conversations among young people finding new meaning in religions rejected by their parents; conversations among the religiously unaffiliated about eclectic new spiritualities encountered in magazines, book groups, or online.
History tells us that this is nothing new. Americans have been talking about religion since the first European settlers arrived in the New World, and the discussion has always occurred at the strange intersection of freedom and passion. The Puritans who came to American seeking religious freedom had to reconcile their intense religious commitment both with the presence of non-Christian natives and almost immediate internal religious dissent. The framers of the Constitution built in the protection of a religious diversity that would soon outstrip their imaginations. What it means to be religious in Americaa, then, has never been a given but rather something to think and talk about, to consciously construct, and to negotiate with others who have an equal stake in the society but may see things very differently.
Surveys consistently show that Americans are among the most religiously-committed citizens of all industrialized societies, somehow dodging the forces of secularization that have transformed Japan and western Europe (Pew Research Center, 2002). But this religiousness is not monolithic. The United States is surely not the only society to include multiple religious traditions, and Diana Eck’s (2001) assertion that it is now “the world’s most religiously diverse nation” may obscure the ongoing overwhelming dominance of Christianity in that mix, but it is true that in the United States religious diversity is vast, and somehow more meaning-laden than it seems to be elsewhere. Perhaps it is be cause freedom of religious expression and the prohibition against a state religious are enshrined in the country’s most important document. Perhaps it is the poser of the American unity-in-diversity myth that makes the mix of American identities not just a social fact but the stuff of children’s pageants and holiday parades. Perhaps it is the role of religion in establishing the nation’s unique sense of purpose. Whatever the reason, when American talk about differences of religion, they are not just discussing alternative visions of the afterlife or comparing ritual practices, but are talking about what it means to be American.
Reprinted with permission of Rutgers University Press. http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu
Reviews
"The book offers an expanding mosaic of arenas in which interfaith contacts are now occurring, and their impact on American life-an excellent read"--Wade Clark Roof, University of California at Santa Barbara.
” McCarthy offers a picture, both encouraging and sobering, of what’s really going on [in] different religious communities throughout the U.S.”-- Paul F. Knitter, Paul Tillich Chair of Theology, World Religions, and Culture, Union Theological Seminary.
Author's Biography
Kate McCarthy is an associate professor of religious studies at California State University, Chico.