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Workplace decision-making is shaped by institutionally delimited and individually appropriated logics of action. Since 1997, when President Clinton issued a White House directive that protected religious expression in the workplace, religious rhetoric and symbolism have played a more significant role in the semiotic codes through which these logics are expressed. While a growing literature has attended to the interplay between the domains of faith and work, relatively little attention has been paid to the ways elite actors negotiate the sometimes competing demands of religious convictions and workplace responsibilities. In this paper, we examine how evangelicals in positions of public leadership account for the role of faith in workplace decision-making. On the basis of our analysis of interview transcripts of 360 national leaders, we construct a taxonomy of dispositions toward faith at work along two primary axes—the expression of faith in workplace decision-making and the reception of it in various situations or by particular reference groups. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From Tom Cruise's wedding to South Park's scathing cartoon parody, the Church of Scientology has emerged as one of the wealthiest, most powerful but also most controversial new religious movements of the last fifty years. Remarkably, however, it has rarely been subjected to serious, critical study by historians of religions, in large part because of the intense secrecy that has surrounded the movement from its origins. This paper examines the role of secrecy in the early Church of Scientology, placing it in the historical and cultural context in which it emerged: Cold War America of the 1950s and 60s. Far from a strange aberration, Scientology in fact embodies many of the obsessive concerns with secrecy, information-control, and surveillance that ran throughout Cold War America. Indeed, with its policies of ‘security checks’ and ‘fair game,’ Scientology developed an apparatus of secrecy and surveillance that rivaled and in fact mirrored that of the FBI. As such, Scientology raises profound questions for the study of religion today, particularly in a post-9/11 context, where the questions of religious privacy and government surveillance have re-emerged in ways that eerily echo the height of the Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists since Durkheim have known there is nothing essential about the category "religion," so why does the category persist? If we can begin to understand why it is still necessary in the twenty-first century for critical theorists to remind us that "religion" is without a vital differentiating element, then perhaps we might begin to imagine more, rather than less, expansive epistemological frameworks. Even as sensitive scholarship works to deconstruct the Enlightened secular typologies that gloss historical inequities, it often misses the cross-cultural patterns of signification that have shaped post-tribal hierarchies for millennia. Critically expanding Robert Bellah's earlier arguments surrounding American Civil Religion, I argue for the role of the immaterial imagination in the establishment of trans-local, supra-kin communities—both nationalist and religious. Drawing on Philo of Alexandria, Isocrates, and Rousseau, I contend that an expansive theory of otherworldliness is necessary to understand the "modern" world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reimagines the history of parenting as a subject for the study of religion. Through a schematic description of parenting in the United States, I observe the expanded responsibilities and increased social expectations for parents in the formation of child identity. Focusing on the concept of parental authority, I argue that the relationship of authority between parent and child is an important document of religious history in a secular age, and encourage future scholars to explore parenting habits, prescriptions, and admonitions as an archive for religious studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. military makes chaplaincies an integral part of its effort to maintain global, “full-spectrum dominance.” The purpose of this article is to analyze the military's design and use of its chaplaincies. I take a textual rather than ethnographic approach. I examine not the subjective views of individual chaplains, but the military's institutional literature and public statements by its chaplains. I argue that the military constructs mission-specific meanings for religion by combining, arranging, and re-framing choices made elsewhere, by other branches of government and various civilian religious communities. The Pentagon optimizes religious diversity for military priorities, puts into uniform and sociologically re-certifies religious leaders, re-conceives pastoral tasks as mission-helps, subsumes religious practices to martial discourse, and calibrates moral sensibilities. Through these publicly authorized acts, the U.S. military wields religion as a multiplier of military force, for the security of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Religion, it has been noted, speaks the language of violence as often as of peace. This article explores the pronounced role of military language and a martial outlook in one particularly intriguing and unlikely branch of Judaism, the Satmar Hasidic movement. Widely known for its posture of theological quietism, Satmar Hasidism, under the leadership of founding rabbi Joel Teitelbaum (1887–1979), has frequently engaged in combative struggle against its foes, especially Zionism. This article highlights this martial impulse by examining three episodes in which the Teitelbaum family and Satmar Hasidim were engaged in conflict, exemplified by the publication of a series of books under the title “Commanded War.” Ranging over a century, these episodes reveal the way in which the pervasive language of war emerged out of a sense of the grave perils posed by modernity. They also illustrate how the martial language of Satmar turns over time from a focus on external enemies to a focus on internal rivals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania professes to be politically neutral, concerned not with secular affairs, political ideology or worldly authority, but only with Jehovah's divine plan. This article examines one explicitly political state of affairs that featured prominently in the literature produced by the Society from 1946 until 1991: the Cold War. During the Cold War years, the dominant narrative of superpower relations was of the two kings in the Book of Daniel. According to the Society, their historic rivalry would only end with the onset of Armageddon. The demise of Soviet Communism necessitated an entirely new interpretation of the rival kings. The subsequent attempt to reconcile the spiritual and the secular in the modern world indicates that the organization is adept at recasting (and resurrecting) failed narratives and adapting contemporary events to reaffirm Charles Taze Russell's interpretations of biblical chronology, first expounded in the 1880s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article I examine the intersection between sexuality and spirit-filled bodies in American Evangelicalism. I am interested in investigating two issues: the sexual body as a site of spiritual battle and the use of popular science, especially the domain of genetics, as material evidence for this spiritual warfare. Specifically, I trace the increasingly spiritualized framing of marital intercourse in evangelical literature. To follow this trajectory, I highlight the spiritualized dangers of transgressive sexuality as well as the sexualizing of spirituality in evangelical sex manuals and deliverance manuals. This article centers around one text, Holy Sex: God's Purpose and Plan for Our Sexuality, whose authors' contend that sexually transmitted diseases are, in fact, demons lodged in genetic material that can be transferred through body fluids and bloodlines. The assertions about biology and demonic affliction made throughout the book are extreme and would be rejected by most readers of mainstream evangelical sex manuals. I argue that this book, though marginal, is not an irrelevant text. It reflects deep-seated anxieties about sexual bodies, spiritual concerns, and disease. Idiosyncratic though it may seem, Holy Sex taps into wider uncertainties about the spiritual vulnerability of the physical body found in contemporary evangelical literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The events of the early twenty-first century have led to a resurgence of interest in the public and private expression of religion and the role of secrecy in religious traditions. In modern incarnations and throughout history, claims to secret knowledge, the limitations of knowledge of the divine, and private or secrete religious activities have existed in all types of religious traditions. From long-standing mystical traditions in Abrahamic faiths to smaller groups such as Theosophists, secrecy touches on many aspects of religious experience. Sociologists, anthropologists, political theorists, historians, and theologians have undertaken studies of religion and secrecy in general and in reference to particular traditions and localities. What follows is an attempt to highlight major themes of religion and secrecy in history and theory, as well as the implications of September 11, 2001, the ‘War on Terror’ and the Patriot Act for religious practice and privacy in the United States of America and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to situate Orthodox Christianity within the context of American religious pluralism in the twenty-first century. It explores the role of Orthodox Christianity, as both subject and object, in the evolution of American religious identity, with particular focus on the domestic, international, and transnational factors that account for the locus of Orthodox Christianity in debates about the religious dimensions of collective identity in America. The article concludes that internal pluralization is redefining the identity and mission of Orthodox Christianity in America, such that the consolidation of a distinct type of American Orthodoxy may allow for a renegotiation of the place of Orthodox Christianity in the American public sphere in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the border between the United States and Mexico as a metaphor where Chicano religions emerge through patterns of border crossings. Crossing of symbolic and physical borders to produce variations on religious formations; Characterization of religious production in the borderlands; Healing across the borders by Teresa Urrea and Fidencio Constantino.

Examines the role of wine in shaping American religious life. Wine's association with the worship of God in the `Protestant-Catholic-Jew' triad; Different interpretations of the Lord's Supper; Amana colonies' use of wine to affirm communal commitments; Wine's role in providing Mormons with a personal experience of religious ecstasy.