The Disestablishment of Religion in America

Do you ever have a book you've heard about, perhaps even quoted, but never actually read? For me, it's been retired UCSB sociologist Philip E. Hammond's 1992 book, Religion and Personal Autonomy and the theory of the "third disestablishment" of American religion.

The Bill of Rights forged the "first disestablishment" of religion determining that church and state would be separated. The second disestablishment occurred in the 20th century between the world wars when “churches found themselves popular but less powerful" (to quote Hammond).

This has led some sociologists to describe a “third disestablishment” of religion. According to Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, during the 1960s,

"Religion, they say, was no less visible in American life, but now it is more likely to divide than to integrate. In other words, religion since the 1960s, to the degree it is important, is more likely to be individually important and less likely to be collectively important." Philip Hammond, citing Roof and McKinney, American Mainline Religion

That last phrase demonstrates the acceleration of religious individualism and brings us to today. In our American religious landscape lies a diversity of new religious movements, fostered not only by the First Amendment and its freedom of religion, but also by American individualism and free market economy. As the standard treatment of American religion by Edwin Gaustad and Leigh Schimdt, The Religious History of America describes the variety of religious movements in the '60s:

“Such movements, which for so long had found America’s volunteristic and democratized milieu a fertile seedbed, only grew more visible and variegated after the 1960s.” Gaustad & Schimdt, The Religious History of America

And here's what I've found in doing research for my soon-to-be-finished book on religion and science in America: As religion becomes more individualized and more private, it atrophies in its ability to engage with science, which is fundamentally a public enterprise.

Today, in fact, we've gone one step further. If anything characterizes contemporary

American religious life, it is pluralism, and emerging adults have been formed in an age of dazzling diversity of all kinds, including worldview, religion, sexual identity, and racial-ethnic concerns. Americans, especially 18-30 years olds, tinker with spirituality or religion, and this creates a Spotify mix of religion (a phenomenon I take to be central to the “spiritual, but not religious” crowd).

No longer is religious belief a vinyl twelve inch LP. Today listeners look to a variety of sources for spiritual input. They use a Spotify mix, in which listeners create a playlist from various artists based on a chosen mood or a feel. In a discussion in my undergraduate Science and Religion class, one student, who had grown up in an evangelical church commented,

“I cherry pick from various religions instead of choosing just one.”

Another student added,

“I’ll stay with being a Catholic, but at times I like Buddhism better. So sometimes I’ll go with that.”

I think Hammond and others are generally right because it makes sense of what the religion on the ground that I see and the students I teach.

As a footnote of sorts, we'd like to think that we curate that mix for ourselves whether it’s with music or spirituality. The irony remains, however, that rarely do we put it together; instead we outsource it to a curator or even a curating algorithm assembled by able computer programmers. The question for all this then is, What do we as Christians say in response?