Answer Relevant Questions

I recently was questioned by a college student which I think are relevant questions to ask and many folks I believe have some of these same questions in mind.

I do well with question and answer formats and find that format a wonderful forum to share ideas. So here are some. Please feel free to submit questions or observations when they arise.

Oki Niksokowa

I will answer your questions as my conscience dictates and good sense has its way.

First I recommend “Where White Men Fear to Tread” by Russell Means - Where-White-Fear-Tread

I think if you pay attention this book will answer many of your questions for you.

Next, I am going to try to answer these questions for my people, not myself. What I think has varying degrees of relevancy to why my People react to a white society driven by a culture very different from ours. This is about my people not me.

1) Are there any American Indian gatherings/groups/organizations in the area that you participate in? If so, how often do they meet and do you find them to be beneficial?

In fact, I know of none in the area that I would recommend. I used to teach publicly for around 13 years but stopped once I got older and concluded that what I had to say was not affecting society to any great extent. I was very naïve about what would take society to wake up and see what they were doing to each other. The fact as our people see it is that there are too many heads in the sand to be assured that the message is being heard.

In addition, there can be and are many charlatans who have large egos and no understanding of our people or who see other people as a money source for them, which is just as bad.

2) Briefly describe the influence of your parents while growing up and the way they shaped the way you look at the world.

What I can say about this is that my parents had the effect on me to look further into my Spirit than most people do. Without that impetus who knows where I would be today?

3) Are there any significant people in our history who are not American Indian that you look up to and respect?

For certain Winston Churchill and John Kennedy along with Ronald Reagan.

4) What is one thing from your culture, history, ancestors, etc. (anything) you could enlighten me on that I would never find in a textbook?

What you can never find in a textbook is how to listen to your heart and what your higher Spirit is telling you. Of course there may be the word written but can they relate what it takes to modify the character?

We are all individuals with no two people in the universe with the same path or goals. Most of us can only guess what our goals are and still cannot define specifically what the Spirit’s have in store for us. Most folks will not tell you that you are not in control of your destiny – that the Spirit’s control who you are, how you react, who you meet and what you do when you meet them. No books that I have read other than possibly Buddhist philosophy will tell you to let go of yourself and your values of yourself and let life take over for you. You can learn much from Buddhism but even that direction has to be dictated by your heart, not how you fit within society. We must be eager to let go judgments’ and look for opportunities to demonstrate that ability to ourselves.

Dealing with an egoistic world is the hardest thing you will have to learn – book’s by their very nature in order to convince you to continue to read direct you in covert ways or not so covert ways towards an egotistical view point of the author or its purpose or play directly to your ego. Very dangerous stuff this!

5) For those who are not in a minority group and have not experienced what you have faced throughout the years, do you find it difficult to form somewhat of a connection with those people?

Not only is it hard to form a connection with these folks it is hard to form a connection with most folks.

The farther along a Spiritual path one evolves the more distant societal directed life becomes. You find yourself yearning to be alone as it is the only intelligible world that remains in sync with what has been defined for your Spirit. It is lonely and yet you are not very lonely! You begin to find that the trees, the grass, the water and nature are more than enough to keep you interested and you simply do not have time for those that are left behind.

Waatowa Pistoto,

Two Feathers - Kainaiwa - Blackfoot Nation

http://www.spiritalk.net

natalk.blogspot.com

http://www.native-americans-online.com

New Landscape of the Religion Blogosphere

Paul Harvey

While the tsunami of the semester rushes over my office and has made it hard to keep up at ye olde blogging, a couple of substantive links to explore. Some of the editors at Immanent Frame have prepared a full-length survey, summary, assessment, and critique of the religion blogosphere. It's an interesting, if daunting, read. Here's a snip which surveyed religion bloggers on gaps in the religion blogsophere:

When asked about gaps in the field, perhaps understandably, some bloggers didn’t come forth with a great many suggestions; after all, most of them started their blogs in order to fill the gaps they perceived. Fredrick Clarkson says, on the other hand, that there are “Too many to count.” But the group had a number of more concrete ideas as well:

• “High quality academic writing from known experts in the field is still missing.” (Robert P. Jones)
• “I’ve had a hard time finding good writing in English about Islam as a lived religion.” (Jeff Sharlet)
• “It seems to me that, just as foundations have been stepping forward to underwrite investigative reporting, so thought ought to be given to doing the same for reporting on religion.” (Mark Silk)
• “At least among theology blogs, there’s an overwhelming predominance of white males; and I think the bigger blogs only represent a relatively small variety of theological viewpoints. So it would be good to see some a lot more diversity.” (Benjamin Myers)
• “I wish that there were more and stronger progressive religious voices, but that’s just me.” (Daniel Schultz)
• “It is a shame that Christianity Today’s daily round-up of news links [by Ted Olsen] has stopped running.” (Richard Bartholomew)
• “Good blogs on the history and philosophy of religion, I think, are still missing.” (Salman Hameed)
• Perhaps it is time to “convene bloggers with a goal of enhancing and expanding their impact and outreach.” (Diane Winston)
• As the blogosphere survey of 100 religion blogs points out, the fact that there is much "missing" means that there is "more data to consume" yet, a daunting conclusion since most everyone feels the surfeit of data and "to be read" pieces is enough already. The piece concludes:
• The key variable for the future of the religion blogosphere is the same as for the Internet as a whole: connectivity. In what ways will people interact, share ideas, form hierarchies, and gather social capital? There are certainly content areas that need to be filled, as the bloggers quoted above suggest. But just as important is the kind of infrastructure within which they work. There likely is, somewhere on the Internet, the great writing on Islam Sharlet is looking for, or the diversity Myers sees as lacking, yet they don’t have the means for finding it. While Web 2.0 brought vast, user-generated content-creation, the challenge of Web 3.0 will undoubtedly be finding ways to make all that information even more accessible, useful, and social—“taming the deluge of data,” as one observer puts it (Griner 2009). Even the nearly 100 blogs discussed in this report are more than most people can afford to keep track of on a daily or weekly basis. The bloggers’ suggestions—more diversity, more investigative journalism, more metro coverage, and so on—all amount to more blogs, more data to consume. The question then becomes: what to do with it all?
• And if that isn't enough for you, the Huffington Post has gotten religion, and has come out of the gate with a strong lineup:
• The bloggers who will be posting on HuffPost Religion will be a great mix of religious heavyweights and up-and-coming voices in the field. Today's thought-provoking lineup includes Rev. Jim Wallis on the spiritual crisis of the recession; Deepak Chopra on the continued importance of spirituality; Eboo Patel on the crucial importance of interfaith relations; Sister Joan Chittister on the future of the Roman Catholic Church; Rabbi Or Rose on the role of religion when it comes to the environment; Dr. Eddie Glaude on the declining power of the Black Church; Sharon Salzberg on Buddhism's "middle way"; Brian McLaren on 'new Evangelicals'; and Steven Barrie Anthony on technology and spirituality.

What about Southern Irreligion?

Art Remillard

As one brilliant (and humble) reviewer summarized, volume one of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture "is comprehensive, relevant, and representative of past and present trends in the field of southern religion." If there is something missing here, chances are Sam Hill's hulking Encyclopedia of Religion in the South would have it.

Yet this morning, while flipping through the entries and indexes of both, I couldn't find a single reference to southern irreligion. No atheism, agnosticism, freethinking, or skepticism. And why would I? As Randall "Emotive Cutting Language" Stephens rightly said, the South is "the prayer capitol of America." But academic historians are in the business of finding new and unexplored topics (and convincing us of how important these topics are). So isn't there someone willing to fill this gap? Well, we might just have somewhere to begin with John Sparks's Kentucky's Most Hated Man: Charles Chilton Moore & The Bluegrass Blade. From the book description:

...born in 1837, [Charles Chilton Moore] was the grandson of religious reformer Barton W. Stone, and was himself a minister in Versailles, Kentucky, before he left the church, passing through deism and agnosticism to eventually declare himself an atheist. Moore founded The Blue Grass Blade newspaper in 1884 in Lexington. He was only able to publish sporadically due to financial and legal problems originating mostly because of the paper's editorial content--attacks on citizens that Moore considered to be bigots (including Bible-thumpers and whiskey distillers) and his advocacy of unpopular positions such as agnosticism and women's suffrage. . . . Moore is considered one of the fathers of American atheism. The Blue Grass Blade was circulated across the country, gaining him notoriety among both the religious and non-religious. . . . His legal trials resulted in landmark Federal judicial decisions which set precedents in the areas of both freedom of religion and
freedom of the press.

Stylistically, the book is similar to Sparks's biography on "Raccoon" John Smith (subtitled, Frontier Kentucky's Most Famous Preacher--I'm seeing a pattern here). In his review, Craig Thompson Friend lamented Sparks's penchant for prolonged digressions, reliance on outdated sources, and lack of attention to the historiography. The same can be said of Kentucky's Most Hated Man. But Sparks is not an academic historian. And he seems rather unconcerned with our insights and criticisms. Still, the book might be conversation starter. Citing Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers, Sparks observes that Moore came along during the "Golden Age of Freethought," and modeled himself after "The Great Agnostic," Robert Green Ingersoll.

So Moore localized a national freethinking trend in Dixie. He also felt the Bible Belt's wrath as a result. The debates that Moore generated found southern evangelicals articulating their beliefs in new ways, fending off the unique challenges put forth by this atheist interlocutor. How many Moores were there in the New South? Who knows. But somewhere, there's an ambitious doctoral student searching for a topic--hopefully that person will be willing to write an encyclopedia entry or two.

Religion in American Politics: A Short History (Review)

Religion in American Politics: A Short History
(review reprinted from the newest issue of Journal of Church and State; pdf available here)

Paul Harvey
Religion in American Politics: A Short History. By Frank Lambert. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. 294pp. $24.95 cloth; $18.95 paper.

In this readable synthetic text, Frank Lambert provides a reasonably brief, accessible, and fair-minded survey of the broad history of religion and American politics from the era of the American revolution to the present, including the 2008 election. He follows broad trends, such as the debates between proponents and opponents of "America as a Christian nation" and zooms in on specific controversies (the 1800 election, Sunday mail delivery, slavery, the New Deal, and contemporary fights between the religious right and religious left) to illuminate those broader themes. Eight chronological chapters follow religious controversies in the era of the founding, the formation, and then breakdown of Protestant unity in antebellum America (where Lambert proposes a useful critique of Mark Noll's thesis in America's God), the gospel of wealth and critical social gospel in the post Civil War years, the Scopes Trial and the modernist-fundamentalist controversy of the early twentieth century, the connection between religious liberalism and New Deal politics in the mid-twentieth century, the civil rights movement as a religious revival, and finally corresponding chapters on the Religious Right and Religious Left. The early chapters, which come from periods of Lambert's greatest scholarly expertise, are the strongest in terms of scholarly sophistication. The middle chapters tend more or less to be summaries derived from secondary literature and have less original argumentation. The final two chapters doubtless will draw the most interest from readers outside academia interested in the author's take on contemporary religio-political fights.

One basic conflict reappears throughout the book and serves as Lambert's central theme. On the one hand, Lambert follows how "religious coalitions seek by political means what the Constitution prohibits, namely a national religious establishment, or, more specifically, a Christian civil religion" (5). Seeking to influence public policy, religious groups "develop moral agendas that become the centerpieces of their political campaigns." On the other hand, from Eza Stiles Ely's call for a "Christian party in politics" in 1810 to Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority in the 1970s and his descendants today, "religion in American politics is contested," and "any religious group's attempt to represent the nation's religious heritage or claim to be its moral conscience" always meets opposition. This basic conflict, between religious visions of a Christian America and secular individualist notions of a politics free from religiously inspired divisions and free to pursue a pluralist polity, has defined the story of religion and American politics.

Lambert implicitly stakes his claim in the Madison/Jefferson school at the end when he joins in these Founders' warnings against sectarian religion as a divisive force in public affairs: "they knew that, given the country's pluralist culture, any expression of religion offered as a guide to national policy would be labeled sectarian and would be contested as such. Two hundred and twenty years after the new republic's birth, critics of both the Religious Right and the Religious Left think the delegates were wise to keep religion out of national politics" (250). The founders, Lambert implies, were wise to make the Constitution a "godless" one and let citizens work out their religious quests on their own.

Protestants remain at the center of the story throughout, with Lambert defending that choice by insisting that Protestants in fact have been in power for much of American history, and in earlier periods represented the vast majority of the population of the country. While this choice is defensible in some regards, it also means that the deep Catholic tradition of thinking about religion and politics is almost completely ignored here, an unfortunate exclusion especially when dealing with the anti-Catholicism that went into nineteenth-century notions of "separation of church and state," as well as the major influence of Catholic social gospelers and New Dealers on twentieth-century social legislation. Except for the civil rights chapter, African Americans make virtually no appearance, and Native peoples are given one paragraph briefly mentioning the ghost dance. In other words, for alternative visions of religion and politics, and alternative ways of defining the category of "religion" itself, readers will have to look elsewhere. This book achieves what it intends: a fair survey of mainstream Protestant conflicts of the relation of religion and politics from the founding to the present.

Listen America!

Randall Stephens

When Jerry Falwell issued his call to arms Listen America! in 1980, he intended to rally the troops. Or to use another metaphor, them dry bones needed reanimatin'. Falwell's words leapt from the page like shouts from a megaphone. "Listen, America! Our nation is on a perilous path in regard to her political, economic, and military positions."

I'm not sure if Ken Ham is taking cues from Lynchburg's fallen saint. Could be. Ham--from the creationist Answers in Genesis fame and director of the sprawling, high tech Creation Museum--is not happy with how things are going in his adopted country. (He's is originally from Australia. I guess that chinstrap beards are popular down under. Though it seems like a hardcore, new metal, Amish thing up here.) As Ham watches America being reduced to moral rubble, there's much to shake a fist at.

In Ham's version of contemporary history, the nation is in need of a swift Jeremiad-kick to the hind quarters. He targets agents of atheism, milquetoast theism, and wild-eyed secularism lurking around every corner in his second State of the Nation address. (See video here. The embedded version seemed to slow things down here.) He is particularly tough on President Obama, who had the audacity to hope that America was more than just a Christian nation. When Obama proclaims: "Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation—at least not just. We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation and a Hindu nation and a nation of nonbelievers," it rings loud alarm bells for Ham and Christian-nation amateur historians like David Barton and Peter Marshall.

Ham's address is interesting on a number of levels. (He takes my colleague and coauthor Karl Giberson to task at around 36:20.) I'm struck by the way that Ham, like millions of other fundamentalists now and from ages past, does not believe in hermeneutics. The Bible is so clear and direct--a one-stop shop for all life's problems--that there is almost no need for interpretation. According to the Heritage Singers, "God said it, and I believe it." Or, as I heard a seminary professor put it some years ago, fundamentalists take their miracles and their passages of scripture straight, no chaser. From a whirlwind of scripture passages emerges a few other themes. A thread of declension runs throughout, depicted well in the helpful cartoons. One major point (surprise) has to do with the fact that evolution is not a science. Another theme: America is slipping from the grasp of true believers. Quislings, meek Christians, have sold out.

Observers can find out a lot about a movement by looking at what it vilifies, damns, or fights. Billy Sunday was no fan of higher criticism and, by extension, Germans. Another Billy, Graham, fought tooth and nail against sin and commies in the late 1940s. Bob Jones, III, battled the feds, who wanted to strip BJU of its tax exempt status. One could go on and on.

I'm still asking the "why" questions about all of this. Why have fundamentalists, and many evangelicals, arrayed themselves against a host of enemies? What's the nature of that embattled feeling? . . . Help me, Matt Sutton!

The View from Pachgatgoch (or, Why Moravians are Still Sexy)

Linford D. Fisher

Moravians are about as exotic as early American history can ever hope to be. And, seemingly, I cannot stop writing about them. Officially, they are not part of my research agenda, but books about them mysteriously appear on my shelves, squeeze their way onto my course reading lists, and land in my mailbox for possible review. This past January, once again, I found myself immersed in the world of early American Moravians as I picked my way through the 1300 hundred pages that comprise one of the most recent publications related to Moravians in early America: an enormous two-volume translation of the German diaries of the Moravian mission in Pachgatgoch, Connecticut, translated and edited by husband and wife team William A. Starna and Corinna Dally-Starna, titled, Gideon’s People: Being a Chronicle of an American Indian Community in Colonial Connecticut and the Moravian Missionaries Who Served There (2009). The diaries span from 1747 through 1763, even though the mission officially started in 1743 and was maintained on and off until 1770. My official evaluation of the volumes will be forthcoming in the New England Quarterly later this year, but the diaries themselves prompted more reflection that I could possibly fit into a book review, so I thought I’d share some of the overflow here.

First and foremost, reading through these diaries reminded me of the surprising religious and ethnic diversity of western Connecticut. Pachgatgoch was in many ways at the crossroads of empire and a place of multiple, overlapping religious regions and ethnicities. Runaway Africans and Indians along with Indian preachers from other parts of the colony drift in and out of Pachgatgoch. EuroAmericans (mostly English and Dutch), likewise, surface in the diaries as inquisitive visitors: Presbyterians, Anglicans, New Lights, Old Lights, Baptists, Separates, Quakers, seekers, and even the occasional Jew or two come to figure out the Moravians and—at times, even try to join them. Peering into the Pachgatgoch records is almost like peeking behind the curtain at a show or performance, or into the basement or attic of a host's house: you find some unexpected things that belie the official presentation. Whatever we might take to be the “center” of religious history in the colonies, these records serve as a warning against privileging too much the urban coastal centers.

Secondly, I was deeply impressed with the intensely intertwinedness of Indian and non-Native lives. Labor is of course the most familiar point of overlap (discussed below), but Indians also routinely cleared out of Pachgatgoch to party all night with their Anglo neighbors. The most frequently recurring (and railed against) example of this is the annual day of post-harvest thanksgiving in the colony. It was an “old custom” of the Indians, according to the Moravians, to go and celebrate late into the night with their “good friends” the white people. Joachim Sensemann let the Pachgatgoch know in no uncertain terms that he “would be pleased if they stayed nicely at home”—to no effect, of course. Not only were Indians out in colonial homes working (and boozing it up), in towns selling brooms, baskets, bowls, and spoons, but colonists were also constantly visiting the small Indian town. In addition to almost daily, more mundane visits by colonial neighbors, on at least two occasions the Anglo congregants of local English minister Cyrus Marsh came to the Moravians’ Sunday services at Pachgatgoch when Marsh was sick or out of town. By the late 1750s, non-Indian attendance at Moravian Indian services was so frequent that it prompted exasperation on the part of Moravian missionaries, who worked hard to shield the Pachgatgoch from outside influences. So ubiquitous were the colonists even on most weekdays that Moravian missionary Johann Mack reported with surprise in 1761 that he had not seen a “white” person for almost four days.

Thirdly, in reading these records, I was reminded of the politicized nature of Indian evangelism at the edges of empire. Not only were the Moravian missionaries arrested and placed on trial in Milford, Connecticut, in 1743 under deep suspicion of being Catholic spies trying to woo local Indians into a military alliance against New England Protestants, but they were subsequently banned from Connecticut for a full six years. Even after they returned, rumors circulated for the next decade that they were supplying the French with powder and shot. (I grappled with some of these issues in an NEQ essay from Sept. 2009.) Over time local colonists grew to accept the Moravians more and more, and even the minister of nearby Kent, Connecticut, cannot seem to forgive himself for not defending the Moravians when they were placed on trial (his excuse was that he had been temporarily swayed against the Moravians by Gilbert Tennent’s 1743 anti-Moravian tract, Some Account of the Principles of the Moravians).

Fourthly, I’ll admit to receiving new insight into the way that drunkenness actually functioned in Native communities. Everyone knows that the drunken Indian quickly became a colonial Indian stereotype; less often discussed are the ways in which drunken men (usually) not only offended EuroAmerican religious sensibilities but also brought tangible fear and physical danger to Indian families and communities. According to the Moravians, at least, drunken Indian men routinely got abusive enough that women and children fled into the woods overnight or to the Moravians’ houses to escape the violent outrages of their husbands, brothers, and sons. In short, drunkenness was a very real social threat for Indians themselves in this period; it was not just something missionaries denounced in fits of cultural arrogance. I knew this, of course, but somehow these records made this more tangible.

Fifthly, the centrality of free and unfree labor for Indians and Africans alike in this period cannot be overstated. My suspicions that debt and labor profoundly shaped much of Indian-African-colonist relations were confirmed by the stories in these volumes. Just one example of this was a colonist who was owed money by a Moravian Indian, marched into Pachgatgoch and, when he couldn’t find the Indian who owed him money, instead randomly kidnapped two Indian children and sold them for profit as servants/slaves.

Sixthly, and lastly, these records confirm, once again, the difficulty of any single group in bringing about the desired religious and cultural transformation in Indian communities. The last few years of the diaries drip with a familiar declension narrative in which the drinking, sexual promiscuity, and religious indifference of Natives spins out of control. The harder the Moravians try to reform specific cultural habits (not clothing Native children, for example), the less the Pachgatgoch respond. The curious thing is, of course, that many Pachgatgoch do continue as Moravian Indian Christians well past the official closing of the mission. Some move to Pennsylvania and some remain in New York and/or Connecticut, but the perceived failure of the Moravians does not always translate into a total abandonment of Christianity by the Pachgatgoch.

In short, the Moravians are still sexy for a reason. These volumes are well worth the hefty price you pay either by purchasing them or lugging them home from the library (plus, you’ll look cool and cutting-edge carrying anything with “Moravian” in the title). The issues raised are numerous and enlightening, and for that we owe Starna and Dally-Starna a big thanks.

The Future of Unification

As I drove home from school yesterday, I listened with interest to NPR report on the wobbly state of the Unification Church in the United States.

The report, well worth a listen, is available both as text and audio here.

I was interested in the rather superficial comparisons the reporter made between the Unification Church and other American religious movements:

[By encouraging academic and financial success instead of quitting school and starting missionary work], the church is taking a page from another new religious movement: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, who are growing by leaps and bounds in part because of their economic success. As to style of worship, the Unification Church is looking to yet another model: the evangelical megachurch.

I'm sure the Mormons won't appreciate being reduced to a Prosperity [Restored] Gospel, and evangelicals at least strive to be more than "bells and whistles." As the reporter rightfully suggests, though, the Unificationists have a long way to go before entering the religious mainstream.

Everywhere and Nowhere

Paul Harvey

In "Everywhere and Nowhere," in today's Inside Higher Education," Kevin Schultz (of the University of Illinois, Chicago) and I summarize some of the basic points made in our new article (of the same title) just out in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion -- you can access that article (free access) here, or in PDF form here. In the shorter piece and the article, we explore the paradox that "In a sense, religion is everywhere in modern American history, but nowhere in modern American historiography," as well as the two major exceptions to that generalization -- in the historiographies of civil rights and modern conservatism:

our general thesis that religion has been everywhere in history but nowhere in historiography has two major exceptions: in historical works on the civil rights movement and the religious right. When it comes to civil rights historiography, religious interpretations have vitally influenced scholarship; indeed, those who downplay the influence of religion tend to be the “heretics,” rather than the other way around. Meanwhile, we now have a small library of books on contemporary figures of the Religious Right, from Jerry Falwell to James Dobson to Phyllis Schlafly.

Noting these two exceptions raises important questions. For example, since these are two groups that have been historically racialized and/or marginalized, does that make it “safer” to incorporate religion more centrally into their intellectual trajectories? And to what degree do they influence the mainstream narrative? In other words, when we move from the mainstream to the margins, does it become safer to introduce religion as a central actor in people’s lives? And if so, will that scholarship focusing on the margins find its way into the mainstream narratives? The almost complete absence of religion from David Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear and James Patterson’s Grand Expectations, the two Oxford History of the United States volumes covering the period from 1932 to 1974, provides just cause for such reflection.

For an interesting companion piece looking at similar developments in the field of sociology, "Sociologists Get Religion," Inside Higher Ed., Feb. 9. A brief bit of it:

The new study on sociology arrives as a working paper of the Social Science Research Council, based on analysis of 587 sociology journal articles on religion, published between 1978 and 2007. The paper -- by David Smilde, a professor of sociology, and Matthew May, a graduate student, both at the University of Georgia -- finds much that would encourage scholars who want to see more research on religion. But the paper also raises questions about whether American sociologists may be too narrowly focused on some religious groups over others, and over the impact of outside funding, which is growing.

Among the key findings:

• The most important general sociological journals have been publishing a modestly growing number of articles about religion over the period studied.
• The articles show "a strong program" emerging on the role of religion in society. At the beginning of the period studied, religion was rarely the independent variable in the research, but by the end of the period, more than half of the articles had religion as the independent variable.
• For most of the period studied, there was an upward trend in positive findings about the role of religion and a downward trend in negative findings. The last five years have seen an increase in negative findings.
• American sociology's study of religion is dominated by religion in the United States and Christianity, with relatively little work on non-Christian religions or the Christian faith of non-Americans.
• Private funding has increased significantly for sociological research on religion, notably from several foundations.
• A positive correlation was found between receiving outside funding and positive findings about religion, although to the surprise of the authors, the strongest correlation was not from private sources of funds but from public sources. (The authors do not have a definitive theory on the source of this correlation and suggest it as a topic for further research.) The changes outlined in the report "are pretty significant" and show "a realization on the part of sociologists and other academics, too, of the enduring significance of religion in the modern world," said Neil Gross, an associate professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia. Gross studies the sociology of academic life, and while he noted "the stereotype that most professors don't pay attention to religion," he added that it has "never really been true."