ISBN : 9780198798071
In the early twenty-first century it had become a cliche that there was a 'God Gap' between a more religious United States and a more secular Europe. The apparent religious differences between the United States and western Europe continue to be a focus of intense and sometimes bitter debate between three of the main schools in the sociology of religion. According to the influential 'Secularization Thesis', secularization has been an integral part of the processes of modernisation in the Western world since around 1800. For proponents of this thesis, the United States appears as an anomaly and they accordingly give considerable attention to explaining why it is different. For other sociologists, however, the apparently high level of religiosity in the USA provides a major argument in their attempts to refute the Thesis. Secularization and Religious Innovation in the Atlantic World provides a systematic comparison between the religious histories of the United States and western European countries from the eighteenth to the late twentieth century, noting parallels as well as divergences, examining their causes and especially highlighting change over time. This is achieved by a series of themes which seem especially relevant to this agenda, and in each case the theme is considered by two scholars. The volume examines whether American Christians have been more innovative, and if so how far this explains the apparent 'God Gap'. It goes beyond the simple American/European binary to ask what is 'American' or 'European' in the Christianity of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in what ways national or regional differences outweigh these commonalities.
Hugh McLeod: Introduction
Part I: Church, State, and Money
1 Stewart J. Brown: The Established Churches and Secularization in Imperial Britain, c.1830-1930
2 Eric Baldwin: Religious Markets, Capital Markets, and Church Finances in Industrializing America
Part II: Evangelicalism
3 David Bebbington: Evangelicalism and Secularization in Britain and America from the 18th Century to the Present
4 Heather Curtis: Media and the Expansion of American Evangelicalism
Part III: Born in America
5 David Holland: The Enemy of my Enemy is sometimes somewhat Useful: The Complicated Relationship of New Religious Movements and Secularization
6 Colleen McDannell: Mormons, Materialism, and the Struggle against the Ideology of Separation
Part IV: Gender
7 Ann Braude: Women's History and Religious Innovation
8 Tine van Osselaer: Gendering Religion in Modern Europe
Part V: Popular Culture
9 Randall Stephens: Popular Culture and Pentecostalism: Comparing Britain and the United States
10 Hugh McLeod: Muscular Christianity: European and American
Part VI: World War, Cold War and Post-War Revival
11 Michael Snape: GI Religion and Post-War Revival in the United States
12 Uta Balbier: European Post-War Revival? US Evangelical Missionaries in Germany and the UK, 1945-55
Part VII: Catholicism in the Era of Vatican II
13 Wilhelm Damberg: Is there an American Exceptionalism? American and German Catholics in Comparison
14 Leslie Woodcock Tentler: How Exceptional? US Catholics since World War II
Part VIII: The 1970s and After
15 Kip Richardson: Of Numeracy and Necromancy: Church Growth in the Post-Secularization Era
16 Grace Davie: Religion, Territory, and Choice: Contrasting Configurations
Conclusions
17 Hugh McLeod: 'Religious America, Secular Europe': Are they really so different? If so, since when and why?
18 David N. Hempton: Small Differences and Differential Innovation: Secularization in Europe and the United States
