Overview:
As a religious system, cultural religion-although diffuse and loose-provides
an mostly ordinary expression of the one American religion. A brief survey
of its manifestations, especially in contemporary times, has shown familiar
elements of cultus, creed, and code. But whether these three shape or are
shaped by a mainstream American community remains ambiguous.
The cultus of cultural religion is present in the annual ritual calendar that evokes millennial themes of dominance in patriotic holidays and of innocence in familial and sentimental feasts. The creed of cultural religion unfolds in thematic popular stories spread, for example, by television, film, literature, and entertainment stars. Commitment to millennial ideas of dominance appears in recurring plot structures of violent redemption and triumph over evil, as in Star Trek, while perfectionism is embodied in ideal models presented in men's and women's magazines and the millennial aspiration to innocence lives on in the legacy of Elvis Presley. Finally, the code of cultural religion expresses norms of behavior guided by millennial mentalities of dominance and innocence in the ethics of sports, technology, humanistic psychology, and nature. In a case study of nature religion as one form of cultural religion, we explored its presence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and then in the nineteenth. In the later twentieth century, we noted its continuing power and expression in a variety of places and especially in the subculture of the Grateful Dead and Deadheads.
This study of cultural religion has tried to suggest its complexity in impressionistic ways. Such thinking about cultural religion has hinted at new approaches to conceiving the boundaries between ordinary and extraordinary religion. In the end, in order to assess the impact of cultural religion it is necessary to place it beside the other expressions of the one religion. In the forms of public Protestantism, civil religion, and general cultural religion, the one religion seeks to dissolve the differences in American life. The power of the one religion is evident in the facts that much of the time it works in public and part of the time it also works in private. Hence, we are left on one side with many religions, each trying to maintain its separate identity, and on the other, with one religion trying to unite them. But to say this does not tell much about the relationships between the two. For if culture is complex, so are these relationships. And there are many questions still to answer.
What was it like to be white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant in the land
that kept receiving the many? What did it mean to be among the many in the
land of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants? And finally, what did the presence
of other minorities do to the experience of separate groups among them?
These are important boundary questions. They are also important questions
about the interactions of ordinary and extraordinary religion. It is crucial
to address these questions, at least briefly, and we will do so in the concluding
chapter.
BACK to table of contents