Peyton Jay
Professor Barfoot
Religion in America 321
25 January 2022
Assignment 2:
Culture of American Religion
I would like to begin by addressing the lecture for this week's course. I found your
sentiment about the first casting a king shadow to be very insightful and actually the first
I had heard of this idea. Religion in America was placed in a box immediately by this
idea or rather line in the sand as you discussed. There were the “good guys” and what
we consider “bad guys” in religion. The more technical classification would be
Evangelicals and Non-Evangelicals. Your standard evangelists are Baptists, Methodists,
and Presbyterians. While the Non- Evangelicals are Native Tribes, Mormans, and
Pentecostals. This separation was present in American Universities as well with
Princeton being on the side of the “good” and the prestigious Harvard landing on what
they referred to as “bad”. In the 1950s however, an important piece of literature was
composed by the name of “Protestant-Catholic Jew” written by Herberg. This name was
significant since those 3 denominations were the major categories for which most
Americans fell for that time. Even more, significantly later on Martin Luther King became
the face of the protestant revolution of religion. Just like every other religion that comes
to America, we find a way to Americanize it. When we had an influx of immigrants from
Latin America as Asian ones. The religions they brought such as Buddhism and
Hinduism soon adopted the idea of Sunday schools. Thus is the overall sense of the
lecture for this week.
The chapter for this week begins with the discussion of studying religion, but not
just studying religion studying it academically. The true difference is we study it in an
environment that is free of certain advocacies. “It educates about all religions and
neither favors nor belittles any. It is loyal first of all to the guidelines of public
scholarship. Its commitments are to knowledge and understanding…” (Chapter 1) This
is important since the current climate in American societies has to ensure that we are
not pushing a religious agenda when studying religion. It talks about how we may find
an admiration or change religious views when studying religion but that is done by
personal choice and not the design of the course. I have noticed that when deciding
which religions to follow, from an American viewpoint, the guidelines involved play a
major role. It’s common for foreign religions’ customs to become villainized while
western religions can become immune to similar practices.
Nearly all religions have guidelines by which those who follow these belief
systems abide. Yet, a Muslim’s choice to wear a Hijab or to pray at certain times a day
is commonly viewed as a threat to safety. When a Jewish man’s choice to wear a
yamaka is perfectly acceptable in our culture. This clashing of views has become all too
common in American religion. The clash is only furthered by the growing popularity of
the Do-it-yourself religion avenue. By having these casual meetings at house churches
religion is less based upon traditional teachings but on personal interests. These
churches can also be highly commercially oriented with religious stickers, T-shirts,
statues, and fundraisers. These forms of religion are very common but aren’t exclusive
to western religious beliefs. Statues of Buddha, meditation mats, Native American
artifacts, and Jewish prayer shawls have their own share of the market.
Moving towards the religious conflict that exists in our country it begins and ends
with the hypocrisy of the Christian church systems. The issues have only been furthered
by the necessity to involve the government, which was inevitable anyway. Religion and
politics while ideally would be separate have been intertwined from their very
conceptions. LGBTQ groups push forward behind supreme court rulings to ensure
marriage equality and are pushed backward by state policies and those with personal
objections. “Would a caterer or a florist who had religious objections to same-sex
marriage be required to provide services for same-sex couples if asked to do so?”
(Chapter 13) Then there’s the entire debate on what is known as reproductive justice.
While it’s perfectly acceptable to have your own views on what should and shouldn’t be
done with pregnancy, it’s completely different to have legal legislation on what is and
isn’t allowed. These battles aren’t strictly on abortion however, they also deal with
children abandoned at the border as well as restrictive laws. These laws are known to;
“...disproportionately affect women of color, immigrants, differently-abled women, and
women in poverty.” (Chapter 13)