\u201cDenominational pluralism, on the American plan,\u201d wrote Will Herberg, \u201cmeans thoroughgoing secularization\u201d (36).<\/p>\n
By \u201csecularization,\u201d Herberg meant a gap between \u201cconventional\u201d and \u201coperational\u201d religion. Conventional religion is that practiced by religious adherents \u2013 Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists. Operational religion is the set of beliefs, rituals, and values that shapes public life. Societies need a common religion to hold together. In traditional societies, the common operational religion is a conventional one; Christian communities can be \u201cchurches\u201d in the Troeltschian sense \u2013 the national community at prayer. In a denominational system, no conventional religion is the operational religion. By definition, that means that denominational societies are secularized.<\/p>\n
As Herberg puts it, \u201cthis country has not had a church since colonial times. The church, in this sense, is essentially the national community on its religious side, the national commimity religiously organized. Even where the transplanted religious bodies set up in the English colonies on the Atlantic Coast were churches to begin with, widespread religious dissidence, coupled with the diversity of population, soon broke the formal religious unity and induced an incipient denominationalism. Denominationalism became the established religious pattern in the wake of the great revival movements; and in denominationalism we have a further and very advanced stage of secularization. For denominationalism, in its very nature, requires a thoroughgoing separation between conventional religion and operative religion, and this is the mark of secularization\u201d (35).<\/p>\n
Even churches that are used to functioning as churches<\/em>\u00a0adjust to the American scene: \u201ceven American Catholics have come to think in such terms; theologically, the Catholic Church, of course, continues to regard itself as the one true church, but in their actual social attitudes American Catholics, hardly less than American Protestants or American Jews, tend to think of their church as a kind of denomination existing side by side with other denominations in a pluralistic harmony that is felt to be somehow of the texture of American life\u201d (36).<\/p>\n The common faith within which conventional religions operate is, Herberg suggests, a trifaith of Protestant-Catholic-Jew (he was writing in 1962). This trifaith system is \u201cthe nation on its religious side\u201d (39). This takes the place of the earlier unofficial establishment of Protestantism.<\/p>\n But his illustration of the \u201cdenominationalization\u201d of the sect of Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses suggests another direction. He cites a Witness article that gave instructions about dressing well. Herberg claimed that the article demonstrates leaders want \u201cWitnesses [to] learn to fit into lower-middle-class suburbia and be accepted by it\u201d (38). The common faith into which they want to be integrated is certainly colored by Protestant-Catholic-Jew; more fundamentally, it is the American way of life. The \u201cnation on its religious side\u201d may be no more than simply \u201cthe nation.\u201d<\/p>\n Herberg knows this. He ends his lecture observing that conventional religions are \u201cintegrated into the \u2018common religion\u2019 of the American Way and made to serve a nonreligious function.\u201d The result has been \u201cincreasingly vacuous\u201d religious life.\u201d Though religion is highly valued (in 1962), it is valued because it is a participation in the American Way, because \u201cit is a religion thoroughly secularized and homogenized, a religion-in-general that is little more than a civic religion of democracy, the religionization of the American Way (44-5).<\/p>\n (Herberg, \u201cReligion in a Secularized Society: The New Shape of Religion in America: Some Aspects of America\u2019s Three Religion Pluralism,\u201d Review of Religious Research<\/em> 3 (1962) 33-45.)<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cDenominational pluralism, on the American plan,\u201d wrote Will Herberg, \u201cmeans thoroughgoing secularization\u201d (36). By \u201csecularization,\u201d Herberg meant a gap between \u201cconventional\u201d and \u201coperational\u201d religion. Conventional religion is that practiced by religious adherents \u2013 Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists. Operational religion is the set of beliefs, rituals, and values that shapes public life. Societies need a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1239,1300],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-denominationalism","category-secularization"],"yoast_head":"\n