Presented to you through Paradigm Publishing Services
University of California Press
Book
Licensed
Unlicensed
Requires Authentication
The Secular Revolution
Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life
-
Edited by:
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2003
About this book
Sociologists, historians, and other social observers have long considered the secularization of American public life over the past hundred and thirty years to be an inevitable and natural outcome of modernization. This groundbreaking work rejects this view and fundamentally rethinks the historical and theoretical causes of the secularization of American public life between 1870 and 1930. Christian Smith and his team of contributors boldly argue that the declining authority of religion was not the by-product of modernization, but rather the intentional achievement of cultural and intellectual elites, including scientists, academics, and literary intellectuals, seeking to gain control of social institutions and increase their own cultural authority.
Writing with vigor and a broad intellectual grasp, the contributors examine power struggles and ideological shifts in various social sectors where the public authority of religion has diminished, in particular education, science, law, and journalism. Together the essays depict a cultural and institutional revolution that is best understood in terms of individual agency, conflicts of interest, resource mobilization, and struggles for authority. Engaging both sociological and historical literature, The Secular Revolution offers a new theoretical framework and original empirical research that will inform our understanding of American society from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The ramifications of its provocative and cogent thesis will be felt throughout sociology, religious studies, and our general thinking about society for years to come.
Many titles in the Voices Revived program are also newly available as ebooks, offered at a discounted price to support wider access to scholarly work.
Writing with vigor and a broad intellectual grasp, the contributors examine power struggles and ideological shifts in various social sectors where the public authority of religion has diminished, in particular education, science, law, and journalism. Together the essays depict a cultural and institutional revolution that is best understood in terms of individual agency, conflicts of interest, resource mobilization, and struggles for authority. Engaging both sociological and historical literature, The Secular Revolution offers a new theoretical framework and original empirical research that will inform our understanding of American society from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The ramifications of its provocative and cogent thesis will be felt throughout sociology, religious studies, and our general thinking about society for years to come.
Many titles in the Voices Revived program are also newly available as ebooks, offered at a discounted price to support wider access to scholarly work.
Author / Editor information
Contributor: Christian Smith
Christian Smith is Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the coauthor of Divided By Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (2001, with Michael O. Emerson), and the author of Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want (California, 2000) and American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (1998).
Topics
-
Download PDFPublicly Available
Frontmatter
i -
Download PDFPublicly Available
Contents
v -
Download PDFPublicly Available
Preface
vii -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
1 Introduction: Rethinking the Secularization of American Public Life
1 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
2 Secularizing American Higher Education: The Case of Early American Sociology
97 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
3 Educational Elites and the Movement to Secularize Public Education: The Case of the National Education Association
160 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
4 The Positivist Attack on Baconian Science and Religious Knowledge in the 1870s
197 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
5 Power, Ridicule, and the Destruction of Religious Moral Reform Politics in the 1920s
216 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
6 “My Own Salvation” The Christian Century and Psychology’s Secularizing of American Protestantism
269 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
7 From Christian Civilization to Individual Civil Liberties: Framing Religion in the Legal Field, 1880–1949
310 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
8 Reforming Education, Transforming Religion, 1876 –1931
355 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
9 Promoting a Secular Standard: Secularization and Modern Journalism, 1870–1930
395 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
10 After the Fall: Attempts to Establish an Explicitly Theological Voice in Debates over Science and Medicine after 1960
434 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Contributors
463 -
Download PDFRequires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Index
467
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
October 9, 2023
eBook ISBN:
9780520936706
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
496
eBook ISBN:
9780520936706
Keywords for this book
secularism; american religion; education; law; legal system; journalism; religious values; agnosticism; atheism; calvinism; censorship; religious freedom; colleges; university; civil liberties; civil war; disciples of christ; darwin; dreiser; higher education; evolution; enlightenment; fundamentalism; harvard; oliver wendell holmes; judaism; democracy; politics; religious studies; nonfiction; bible; cultural studies; american history; culture; theology; sociology of religion; secularization; christianity; religion
