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In 2006, the contemporary American Pentecostal movement celebrated its 100th birthday. Over that time, its African American sector has been markedly influential, not only vis-à-vis other branches of Pentecostalism but also throughout the Christian church. Black Christians have been integrally involved in every aspect of the Pentecostal movement since its inception and have made significant contributions to its founding as well as the evolution of Pentecostal/charismatic styles of worship, preaching, music, engagement of social issues, and theology. Yet despite its being one of the fastest growing segments of the Black Church, Afro-Pentecostalism has not received the kind of critical attention it deserves. This book examines different facets of the movement, including its early history, issues of gender, relations with other black denominations, intersections with popular culture, and missionary activities, as well as the movement's distinctive theology. The chapters reflect on the state of the movement, chart its trajectories, discuss pertinent issues, and anticipate future developments.

In the early 1990s, a grassroots coalition of churches in Baltimore, Maryland helped launch what would become a national movement. Joining forces with labor and low-wage worker organizations, they passed the first municipal living wage ordinance. Since then, over one hundred and forty-four municipalities and counties as well as numerous universities and local businesses in the United States have enacted such ordinances. Although religious persons and organizations have been important both in the origins of the living wage movement and in its continuing success, they are often ignored or under analyzed. Drawing on participant observation in multiple cities, this book analyzes and evaluates the contributions of religious activists to the movement. The book explores the ways that religious organizations do this work in concert with low-wage workers, the challenges religious activists face, and how people of faith might better nurture moral agency in relation to the political economy. Ultimately, it provides clarity on how to continue to cultivate, renew, and expand religious resources dedicated to the moral agency of low-wage workers and their allies.

Yoga, humanistic psychology, meditation, holistic healing: these practices are commonplace today, yet before the early 1960s they were atypical options for most people outside of the upper class or small groups of educated spiritual seekers. Esalen Institute, a retreat for spiritual and personal growth in Big Sur, California, played a pioneering role in popularizing quests for self-transformation and personalized spirituality. This “soul rush” spread quickly throughout the United States as the Institute made ordinary people aware of hundreds of ways to select, combine, and revise their beliefs about the sacred and to explore diverse mystical experiences. Millions of Americans now identify themselves as spiritual, not religious, because Esalen paved the way for them to explore spirituality without affiliating with established denominations. This book explores the concept of spiritual privilege and Esalen's foundational influence on the growth and spread of diverse spiritual practices that affirm individuals' self-worth and possibilities for positive personal change. The book also describes the people, narratives, and relationships at the Institute that produced persistent, almost accidental inequalities in order to illuminate the ways that gender is central to religion and spirituality in most contexts.

The Assemblies of God (AG) is the ninth-largest American and the world's largest Pentecostal denomination, with over 50 million followers worldwide. The AG embraces a worldview of miracles and mystery that makes “supernatural” experiences, such as speaking in tongues, healing, and prophecy, normal for Christian believers. Ever since it first organized in 1916, however, the “charismata” or “gifts of the Holy Spirit” have felt tension from institutional forces. Over the decades, vital charismatic experiences have been increasingly tamed by rituals, doctrine, and denominational structure. Yet the path towards institutionalization has not been clear-cut. New revivals and direct personal experience of God—the hallmarks of Pentecostalism—continue as an important part of the AG tradition, particularly in the growing number of ethnic congregations in the United States. This book draws on fresh, up-to-date research including quantitative surveys and interviews from twenty-two diverse AG congregations to offer a new sociological portrait of the AG for the new millennium. The book suggests that there is indeed a potential revitalization of the movement in the works within the context of the larger global Pentecostal upswing, and that this revitalization may be spurred by what the book calls “godly love,” the dynamic interaction between divine and human love that enlivens and expands benevolence.

Black Catholics are absent in most histories of U.S. Catholicism and African American religion. Drawn from a wide variety of sources, this book is a lived religious history of Black Catholics in Chicago that demonstrates how new characters and conclusions come to the fore when we move Black Catholics from the margins of our stories to their center. As the Great Migrations transformed the religious landscape of the urban North, Black migrants forged fraught relationships with white missionaries intent on converting entire neighborhoods. Tens of thousands of Black people became Catholic in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. When they did so, they embraced a ritual life and relationships that distinguished them from the evangelical churches proliferating around them. These rituals and relationships came under intense scrutiny by the late 1960s, however, when a growing group of Black Catholic activists sparked a revolution in U.S. Catholicism. Inspired by Black Power and Vatican II, they fought for the self-determination of Black parishes and the right to be both “authentically Black and truly Catholic.” This was neither inevitable nor uncontroversial, however. Faced with strong opposition from fellow Black Catholics, activists became missionaries of a sort as they sought to convert coreligionists to a distinctively Black Catholicism. Rather than presume the unanimity of black consciousness, the ubiquity of Black activism, or the uniformity of Black religion, this book brings to light the lived complexity of being Black and Catholic in Chicago, one of the most significant Catholic communities in the country.

In the wake of the Mexican–American War, competing narratives of religious conquest and re-conquest were employed by Anglo American and ethnic Mexican Californians to make sense of their place in North America. These “invented traditions” had a profound impact on North American religious and ethnic relations, serving to bring elements of Catholic history within the Protestant fold of the United States' national history as well as playing an integral role in the emergence of the early Chicano/a movement. Many Protestant Anglo Americans understood their settlement in the far Southwest as following in the footsteps of the colonial project begun by Catholic Spanish missionaries. In contrast, Californios—Mexican-Americans and Chicana/os—stressed deep connections to a pre-Columbian past over to their own Spanish heritage. Thus, as Anglo Americans fashioned themselves as the spiritual heirs to the Spanish frontier, many ethnic Mexicans came to see themselves as the spiritual heirs to a southwestern Aztec homeland.

This book explores the social and political activism of American Jewish women from approximately 1890 to the beginnings of World War II. It demonstrates that no history of the birth control, suffrage, or peace movements in the United States is complete without analyzing the impact of Jewish women's presence. The book is based on years of extensive primary source research in more than a dozen archives and among hundreds of primary sources, many of which have previously never been seen. Personal papers and institutional records paint a vivid picture of a world in which both middle-class and working-class American Jewish women were consistently and publicly engaged in all the major issues of their day and worked closely with their non-Jewish counterparts on behalf of activist causes. The book makes a unique contribution to the study of modern women's history, modern Jewish history, and the history of American social movements.

This book argues that religion made a difference in black working women’s activism and organizational strategies in the struggle for social justice in the first half of the twentieth century. Living and working in an overwhelmingly white and affluent New Jersey suburb, black women like Violet Johnson initially entered public space through their church work. Their willingness to challenge hegemonic assumptions of gender, race, and class amid the nationalization of Jim Crow segregation mattered in the churches they built, the institutions they created, and the communities they sustained. They negotiated alliances across gender, race, and class boundaries, expanded the church’s mission, collaborated in the woman’s temperance reform movement, transformed the white state woman suffrage association into an interracial organization, and converted their Christian service into a force in electoral politics. Over a half century their goals evolved, but their basic strategy of community organizing remained constant. So did their commitment to civic righteousness, just laws, and moral institutions. In contrast to analyses that focus on middle-class women’s activities, this study, anchored in the religious narratives of two women who emerged as state and national leaders, one a domestic servant and Baptist missionary and the other a seamstress and ordained African Methodist Episcopal Zion minister, foregrounds the agency of non-elite black women and their important albeit bounded victories. It reperiodizes the Civil Rights Movement by showing how racial segregation worked in the North and what African American church women’s organizing meant.

Mexican American folk and religious healing, often referred to as curanderismo, has been a vital part of life in the Mexico–U.S. border region for centuries. A hybrid tradition made up primarily of indigenous and Iberian Catholic pharmacopeias, rituals, and notions of the self, curanderismo treats the sick person with a variety of healing modalities including herbal remedies, intercessory prayer, body massage, and energy manipulation. Curanderos, “healers,” embrace a holistic understanding of the patient, including body, soul, and community. This book examines the ongoing evolution of Mexican American religious healing from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. Illuminating the ways in which curanderismo has had an impact not only on the health and culture of the borderlands but also far beyond, the book tracks its expansion from Mexican American communities to Anglo and multiethnic contexts. While many healers treat Mexican and Mexican American clientele, a significant number of curanderos have worked with patients from other ethnic groups as well, especially those involved in North American metaphysical religions like spiritualism, mesmerism, New Thought, New Age, and energy-based alternative medicines. The book explores this point of contact as an experience of transcultural exchange. Drawing on historical archives, colonial-era medical texts and accounts, early ethnographies of the region, newspaper articles, memoirs, and contemporary healing guidebooks as well as interviews with contemporary healers, the book demonstrates the notable and ongoing influence of Mexican Americans on cultural and religious practices in the United States, especially in the American West.

During the Progessive Era, a period of unprecedented ingenuity, women evangelists built the old time religion with brick and mortar, uniforms and automobiles, fresh converts and devoted protégés. Across America, entrepreneurial women founded churches, denominations, religious training schools, rescue homes, rescue missions, and evangelistic organizations. Until now, these intrepid women have gone largely unnoticed, though their collective yet unchoreographed decision to build institutions in the service of evangelism marked a seismic shift in American Christianity. This study dusts off the unpublished letters, diaries, sermons, and yearbooks of these pioneers to share their personal tribulations and public achievements.

Christian filmmaking, done outside of the corporate Hollywood industry and produced for Christian churches, affected a significant audience of church people. Protestant denominations and individuals believed that they could preach and teach more effectively through the mass medium of film. Although suspicion toward the film industry marked many conservatives during the early 1930s, many Christian leaders came to believe in the power of technology to convert or to morally instruct people. Thus the growth of a Christian film industry was an extension of the Protestant tradition of preaching, with the films becoming celluloid sermons. This is the first historical study of this phenomenon. It highlights key characters, studios, and influential films of the movement from 1930 to 1986—such as the Billy Graham Association, with its major WorldWide Pictures productions of films like The Hiding Place, Ken Curtis' Gateway Films, the apocalyptic “end-time” films by Mark IV (e.g. Thief in the Night), and the instructional video-films of Dobson's Focus on the Family—assessing the extent to which the Church's commitment to filmmaking accelerated its missions and demonstrating that its filmic endeavors had the unintended consequence of contributing to the secularization of liberal denominations.

More than anywhere else in the Western world, religious attachments in America are quite flexible, with over 40 percent of U.S. citizens shifting their religious identification at least once in their lives. This book draws on empirical data from large-scale national studies to provide a comprehensive portrait of religious change and its consequences in the United States. With analysis spanning across generations and ethnic groups, the book traces the evolution of the experience of Protestantism and Catholicism in the United States, the dramatic growth of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, and the rise of non-identification, now the second most common religious affiliation in the country. The book details the impact of religious commitments on broad arenas of American social life, including family and sexuality, economic well-being, political commitments, and social values. Exploring religious change among those of European heritage as well as of Eastern and Western European immigrants, African Americans, Asians, Latin Americans, and Native Americans, the book not only provides a comprehensive and ethnically inclusive demographic overview of the juncture between religion and ethnicity within both the private and public sphere, but also brings empirical analysis back to the sociology of religion.

Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, significant numbers of Haitian immigrants began to arrive and settle in Miami. Overcoming some of the most foreboding obstacles ever to face immigrants in America, they, their children, and now their grandchildren, as well as more recently arriving immigrants from Haiti, have diversified socioeconomically. Together, they have made South Florida home to the largest population of native-born Haitians and diasporic Haitians outside of the Caribbean and one of the most significant Caribbean immigrant communities in the world. Religion has played a central role in making all of this happen. This book is a historical and ethnographic study of Haitian religion in immigrant communities. Where many studies of Haitian religion limit themselves to one faith, the book explores Catholicism, Protestantism, and Vodou in conversation with one another, suggesting that despite the differences between these practices, the three faiths ultimately create a sense of unity, fulfillment, and self-worth in Haitian communities. The book contributes to the growing body of literature on religion among new immigrants, as well as providing a rich exploration of Haitian faith communities.

In the 1990s, Marilyn Agee developed one of the most well-known amateur evangelical websites focused on the “End Times,” The Bible Prophecy Corner. Around the same time, Lambert Dolphin, a retired Stanford physicist, started the website Lambert's Library to discuss with others online how to experience the divine. While Marilyn and Lambert did not initially correspond directly, they have shared several correspondents in common. Even as early as 1999 it was clear that they were members of the same online network of Christians, a virtual church built around those who embraced a common ideology. This book documents how such like-minded individuals created a large web of religious communication on the Internet, in essence developing a new type of religious movement—one without a central leader or institution. Based on over a decade of interaction with figures both large and small within this community, the book offers the first sustained ethnographic account of the movement as well as a realistic and pragmatic view of how new communication technologies can both empower and disempower the individuals who use them. By tracing the group's origins back to the email lists and “Usenet” groups of the 1980s up to the online forums of today, the book also serves as a succinct history of the development of online group communications.

One of the unique aspects of the religious profession is the high percentage of those who claim to be “called by God” to do their work. This call is particularly important within African American Christian traditions. This book offers a rare sociological examination of this markedly understudied phenomenon within black ministry. It draws on over one hundred in-depth interviews with Black Pentecostal ministers in the Church of God in Christ—both those ordained and licensed and those aspiring—to examine how these men and women experience and pursue “the call.” Viewing divine calling as much as a social process as it is a spiritual one, the book delves into the personal stories of these individuals to explore their work as active agents in the process of fulfilling their calling. In some cases, those called cannot find pastoral work due to gender discrimination, lack of clergy positions, and educational deficiencies. The book looks specifically at how those who have not obtained clergy positions understand their call, exploring the influences of psychological experience, the congregational acceptance of their call, and their response to the training process. It emphasizes how those called reconceptualize clericalism in terms of who can be called, how that call has to be certified, and what those called are meant to do, offering insight into how social actors adjust to structural constraints.

Elijah Muhammad is arguably the most significant figure in the history of Islam in the United States. Successor to W. D. Fard, the founder of the Nation of Islam, and a mentor to Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad led the Nation of Islam for over forty years. This book focuses on Elijah Muhammad's religiosity, which is frequently brought into question as the authenticity of the Nation of Islam as “truly Islamic” remains hotly debated. To better comprehend this powerful and controversial figure, the book contextualizes Elijah Muhammad and his religious approach within the larger Islamic tradition, exploring his use of the Qur'an, his interpretation of Islam, and his relationships with other Muslims. Above all, the book seeks to understand—not define or label—Muhammad as a Muslim. To do otherwise, the book argues, is to misunderstand and distort the man, his teachings, his movement, and his legacy.

Black theology tends to be a theology about no-body. Though one might assume that black and womanist theology have already given significant attention to the nature and meaning of black bodies as a theological issue, this inquiry has primarily taken the form of a focus on issues relating to liberation, treating the body in abstract terms rather than focusing on the experiencing of a material, fleshy reality. By focusing on the body as a physical entity and not just a metaphorical one, this book offers a new approach to theological thinking about race, gender, and sexuality. The body is of profound theological importance. As the first book on black theology to take embodiment as its starting point and its goal, it interrogates the traditional source materials for black theology, such as spirituals and slave narratives, seeking to link them to materials such as photography that highlight the theological importance of the body. Employing a multidisciplinary approach spanning from the sociology of the body and philosophy to anthropology and art history, the book pushes black theology to the next level.

The Emerging Church movement developed in the mid-1990s among primarily white, urban, middle-class pastors and laity who were disenchanted with America's conservative Evangelical sub-culture. It is a response to the increasing divide between conservative Evangelicals and concerned critics who strongly oppose what they consider overly slick, corporate, and consumerist versions of faith. A core feature of their response is a challenge to traditional congregational models, often focusing on new church plants and creating networks of related house churches. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, the book explores the impact of the Emerging Church movement on American Evangelicals. It combines ethnographic analysis with discussions of the movement's history, discursive contours, defining practices, cultural logics, and contentious interactions with conservative Evangelical critics to rethink the boundaries of “Evangelical” as a category. Ultimately, the book makes a novel contribution to our understanding of the important changes at work among American Protestants, and illuminates how Emerging Evangelicals interact with the cultural conditions of modernity, late modernity, and visions of “postmodern” Christianity.

It is widely recognized that American culture is both exceptionally religious and exceptionally violent. Americans participate in religious communities in high numbers, yet American citizens also own guns at rates far beyond those of citizens in other industrialized nations. Since 9/11, American scholars have understandably discussed religious violence in terms of terrorist acts, a focus that follows American policy. Yet, according to this book, to identify religious violence only with terrorism fails to address the long history of American violence rooted in religion throughout the country's history. In essence, Americans have found ways to consider blessed some very brutal attitudes and behaviors both domestically and globally. The book explains how both of these distinctive features of American culture work together by exploring how constructions along the lines of age, race, and gender have operated to centralize cultural power across American civil or cultural religions in ways that don't always appear to be “religious” at all. It traces the development of these forms of systemic violence throughout American history, using evidence from popular culture, including movies such as Rebel without a Cause and Reefer Madness, and works of literature such as The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and The Handmaid's Tale, to illuminate historical events. Throughout, the book focuses on the complex and durable interactions between religion and violence in American history, from Puritan Boston to George W. Bush's Baghdad.

This book examines how a new paradigm of ethnicity and religion is shaping contemporary immigrant religious institutions and the intergenerational transmission of religion. While earlier European immigrants to the United States were expected to assimilate to the culture of the host society in the public realm, they could maintain their community lives and cultural traditions through American denominations. In contemporary society, multiculturalism and post-denominationalism have reversed this paradigm. First- and second-generation immigrants integrate by remaining ethnic and group-identified, but religion is viewed as a personal quest. Drawing on multisited field research in the United States and India, including interviews and participant observation in the Mar Thoma Syrian Christian denomination belonging to an ancient south Indian community, the book looks at the shifts in the understanding and practice of Christianity by church members as a result of their U.S. migration and the coming of age of the American-born generation. The widespread prevalence of megachurches and the dominance of American evangelicalism created an environment in which the traditional practices of the Mar Thoma church seemed alien to its American-born generation. Second-generation Mar Thoma Americans were caught between their criticisms of the “ethnic” character of the Mar Thoma church and its traditions, and their appreciation for the social support its warm community and familial relationships provided them as they were growing up. This book is also a case study of global religion. It examines how transnational processes shape religion in both the place of destination and the place of origin.