American Religion 美国宗教发展历程

Religion in AmericaIn a Christian world, many countries in the West have experienced declines in religious observance and increases in secularization in the twentieth century. This is often attributed to the influences of industrialization, consumerism, materialism, hedonism, mass culture, and universal education. The United States, however, seems to be an exception. Despite its materialistic image and intense worship of “mighty dollars”, the U. S. still remains the most religious country in the Western countries. In comparison with European countries, America not only has a greater number of religious believers, but also enjoys a much higher church survey, The Economist reported that about 95 percent of Americans believed in God; four out of five believed in miracles, life after death and the Virgin Mary birth; 6.5 percent believed in the devil; 75 percent believed in angels; and nine out of ten owned a bible. Similarly, surveys by the Gallup Organization in the early 1990s indicated that among Americans under 30 years old, about 36 percent attended church on regular basis, while close to 47 percent of the people at or over 50 went to church once in a week.Is America a religious culture, shaped by men who sought freedom of worship, with God constantly present in their minds even when the Church has become formalized? Or is it a secular culture with religion playing only a marginal role in men’s daily lives since the Untied States long time ago separated Church andState? To answer these two questions is no less than looking into the dynamics of American culture and the complexity of American society. The fact of the matter is that each of these questions can be answered affirmatively. America is as secular as a culture can be where religion has played an important role in its origins and early growth, and has been interwoven with the founding and meaning of the society. America is also as religious as a culture can be whose life goals are worldly and whose daily strivings revolve not around God but around Man.God and ManThe mixture of theocracy and secularism is actually one of the American religious heritages. One can find the strong religious base of American life and thought in the older Puritan communities of New England and in the new frontier states. The Calvinist doctrine of predestination, for example, played a dominant role in the early colonists. People moving to the frontiers in the West were mostly inspired by the vast stretch of land available for attainment. They dreamed of getting rich quick, and at the same time tried to comfort their souls by waging religious revivals there. At the time Americans embraced Enlightenment ideas and applied them in their political, social and economic life, they still constantly referred to the Holy Scripture for conviction and reassurance. Even in the contemporary Atomic Age where science and technology has developed to an unprecedented level, there has been an activerevival of religious feeling among the American people, old and young, in modern cities. To a certain degree, this mixture of 17th-century rationalism (Science and Technology), and mid-20th-century revival may help explain some of the contradictions in the relations between God and Man in America. America is regarded as a “Christian country”. The influence of Judaic-Christian doctrines upon American culture has been profound. For example, the religious doctrine of the soul is so crucial and pervasive in Western (including American) conceptions of man that no one would deny that Judaic-Christian doctrine is a major element in shaping American national character and culture. In the minds of American Christian believers, the idea that man has a soul and that all souls are “equal before God”has been basic to the ethical evaluation of individual personality. The idea of the worth, dignity, and inviolability of the individual unquestionably owes much to this belief, as do humanitarian ideas and various philosophies of human equality.Historically speaking, the whole idea of God and individual soul goes back to the sixteenth century. As the child of the Reformation, Americans took over not only its dominantly Protestant heritage, but also its deep individualistic strain. Every European sect that had found itself constricted or in trouble emigrated to the New World, which thus became a repository of all the distillations of Reformation thought and feeling. Since the Reformation had broken with the authority of the Roman Catholic Church and left to the individual meaning of the Scripture, America became a congeries of judging individuals, each of themweighing the meaning and application of the Word. A Bible-reading people emerged, drenched in the tradition of the Old and New Testaments. This may help explain the stress on the idea of “covenant with God” in Ameri can thought. It also suggests why a people so concerned with the meaning of the Holy Writ have been the first to give a sacred character to a written Constitution but at the same time remain a nation of amateur interpreters of the Constitution.Two basic concepts of the Christian—the soul and sin—took on a new emphasis in individualist America. Each man was the judge of his own religious convictions, since his possession of an immortal soul gave such an inner worth regardless of color, rank, or station, political belief, wealth or poverty. Thus, the foundation was laid for religious freedom early on in the Untied States. On the other hand, if each man had an immortal soul to save, it was because it had been steeped in sin. As a Bible-reading people, Americans took over many of the preconceptions of the Hebraic society in which Judaism and early Christianity were rooted. Among them was the sense of individual sin—aside from original, or inevitable sin—without which there could be no individual salvation.There is a resulting ambiguity between the sin-and-salvation strain in Christian doctrine and the organic optimism of American economic and social attitudes. The Hebrew prophets, as they lamented the disintegration of Biblical society, called on each Jew to war d off God’s wrath from his people by cleansing himself of his own inner guilt; the Christian allegory added to the sombernessof this conception. But there have been few occasions on which Americans could believe with any conviction in an impending collapse of their social structure and their world. The sense of sin and the sense of doom were therefore importations from the Old and New Testaments that somehow flowered in the American soil in spite of worship of money and success, or, perhaps, exactly because of this worship, for in this case, it required a compensating doctrine to ease the conscience.The result has been an American religious tradition which is on the one hand deeply individualistic, anti-authoritarian, and concerned with sin and salvation, and yet, on the other hand, secular and rationalist in its life goals, and concerned with happiness in this world. Americans, growing up in this religious tradition, have been salvation-minded, each believer engrossed in his relation not to the church but to God, in Whom he was to find salvation. At the same time, they have also formed a secular rather than a sacred society, in which everybody pursued his earthly comforts according to his own conscience。