Overview:
As religious manyness intensified in the late-twentieth-century United States,
religious cultures of expansion and contraction also flourished. One leading
example of the contemporary religious culture of expansion has been the
New Age movement, which congealed in the late sixties and early seventies.
With roots that include mesmerism, Swedenborgianism, and spiritualism as
well as Transcendentalism, New Thought, Christian Science, and theosophy,
the New Age has also drawn on quantum physics, on various forms of psychology
and parapsychology, and on a growing environmental movement. The New Age
reflects, too, forms of Asian and Native American religion, and it turns
to alternative forms of healing even as it takes its name, in part, from
its astrological beliefs.
These ingredients of New Age religion have been appropriated in different ways by different groups of New Age people. To help sort out the situation, it is useful to adopt a distinction between philosophical and phenomenal tendencies within the New Age. For a fully functioning religion, of course, reflective thought and phenomenal action must both be present. At the same time, many New Agers have emphasized the philosophical side of religion, while others have turned more to the phenomenal. In the religious creed of the New Age, the theory of correspondence expresses a connection claimed by believers between the universe and themselves. But in this creed, too, matter and energy are seen as interchanging, so that beliefs in transformation and in human perfectibility have been central.
In keeping with these beliefs, the New Age code has stressed harmony, but it has also stressed change. Thus, in the New Age code right action for the individual is viewed as action conforming to the laws of nature, but right action is also seen as action that enhances healing. Similarly, right action for society is thought to be action according to harmonial principles of cooperation instead of warring moralities of competition. But right action also means what New Age people call "healing the planet," in causes ranging from environmentalism to antinuclearism and feminism. Meanwhile, New Age cultus has developed in a seeming kaleidoscope of ritual practices, all of them related to the creed and code. Some of the ritual work has emphasized the more harmonial side of New Age religion, as in the form of Japanese palm healing known as Reiki. Other forms of ritual work have paid more attention to mental factors in efforts toward transformation, as in shamanic journeying. Together creed, code, and cultus have helped to define a New Age community bound both by a common language and by the action that New Agers believe will empower individuals and transform society. With their many sources, diverse membership, and abundance of practices, New Agers are a prime example of the religious culture of expansion.
By contrast, the fundamentalist-evangelical movement has expressed the religious culture of contraction and consolidation in contemporary American society. With the separation, in 1941 and 1942, between strict and moderate fundamentalists, the stage was set for the present fundamentalist-evangelical spectrum. Here strict fundamentalists retain the name fundamentalist, moderates are known as evangelical, and others, notably from the holiness-pentecostal tradition, have also acquired the name evangelical. Together these groups, plural as they are, have found common ground. Even so, looking at key theological, historical, social, and political differences yields important sources for understanding them.
Theologically, strict fundamentalists hold to premillennial dispensationalism with a sequence of end-time events that includes rapture for the saints, tribulation for the world, a final battle at Armageddon, and the victorious rule of Christ and the saints. More liberal evangelicals accept higher critical study of the Bible, modify beliefs in biblical literalness and inerrancy, and accommodate themselves to social-scientific approaches to religion and the like. Historically, the late-century fundamentalist-evangelical movement encompasses an older fundamentalist community in the direct lineage of the early-century Fundamentals. But it also includes many fellow travelers, most salient among them groups within the holiness-pentecostal tradition (although African-American "Bible-believers" and other ethnic evangelicals, especially with Latino or Korean roots, might also be cited). In matters of social style, most visible have been the exuberance and flamboyance of the electronic church, with televangelists who have succeeded in building huge national followings. But there has been a quieter, more contemplative social style within the fundamentalist-evangelical movement, and its trail can be followed in the sale of millions of Bibles (despite a purported "bump" in the Bible market in 1996), the proliferation of biblical study groups, and other indicators of personal devotion. Meanwhile, fundamentalists and evangelicals have organized politically in the New Christian Right in support of conservative causes. Here they have worked for a strong national defense and have paid attention to matters that touch domestic life, traditional sexual roles and morality, and the character of public education. Conversely, a small number have understood themselves as radical evangelicals and have worked for what they see as return to a biblical morality of justice and mercy that often translates for them into support for a politics of the left, What unifies fundamentalists and evangelicals in the midst of these differences is a strong affirmation of the authority of the Bible and the centrality of the life and teaching of Jesus. Thus, the creed of the movement centers on the Bible and belief in a traditional Christian message regarding sin and grace, salvation and divine purpose in human history. The code that follows from the creed has stressed personal holiness for individuals and, in society, a quest for good order as well as missionary action. Related to creed and code, cultus has emphasized preaching and prayer in community worship and has fostered, too, a concern for more intimate experiences understood as conversion and Spirit blessing. Also fostered has been a sustained biblical devotionalism. The fundamentalist-evangelical community that shares the creed, code, and cultus moves between a sense of separation from the world and an impulse toward joining it, as the example of Promise Keepers illustrates.
When we juxtapose the fundamentalist-evangelical community to the New Age movement, structural comparison shows surprising points of similarity, Emphases on millennial themes, on direct experience, on ongoing revelation, on the need for healing, on literalness in belief and expectation, and on a democracy of believers and new forms of community characterize both groups. Yet the way each group comes to terms with the extraordinary and ordinary in religion is decidedly different. New Agers more easily fuse the two with their ruling cosmology of correspondence. Fundamentalists and evangelicals stress the separation between extraordinary and ordinary, but in their belief in the biblical God who acts in history they bring the extraordinary close to the ordinary world. The New Age fusion of extraordinary and ordinary points toward the expansiveness of New Age religion. By contrast, the separatist tendency in fundamentalist-evangelical ap- propriation of both suggests the contractive and consolidating quality of that religious stance.
As manyness multiplies in the contemporary United States, the cultural system requires both expansive and contractive religion to achieve balance. But greater plurality means a greater need for both expansion and contraction. And the results are often troubling in their promotion of extremism and hostility between opposing factions. While benefits also come with challenge in the cultural situation, the religions of expansion and contraction have historically been supported by a more centrist religious force that softens oppositions and mediates differences. In other words, for all the manyness within American religious history, there has been a religious common ground, a "one religion," if you will, that has smoothed disparities and promoted homogeneity.
We have encountered this "one religion" a number of times in
the extended examination of the manyness of religions in the United States.
Until now, we have looked at length at that manyness, trying to sharpen
our focus on numerous different centers of meaning, power, and value that
have flourished within the pluralism of the land. At this point, however,
it is the issue of the nature and extent of any public oneness that must
engage us. In Part Two ask a question fundamental to the study of American
religious history: if American religions are so many, how in any way can
they be one?
BACK to table of contents