E. Franklin Frazier’s *The Negro Church in America* is a foundational text in African American religious studies, examining the intersection of religion, sociality, and politics. Published in 1964 amid the Civil Rights Movement, it analyzes the historical trajectory of African Americans, from the transatlantic slave trade to the Great Migration. This roundtable reevaluates Frazier’s work, assessing its enduring significance and offering contemporary insights. Presenters delve into specific chapters, discussing themes such as the impact of slavery on religious practices, the development of independent Black churches, and their roles post-Emancipation. Panelists critique Frazier’s theories on assimilation and gender dynamics, reflecting on their implications today. With diverse perspectives from scholars of various backgrounds, the roundtable aims to deepen our understanding of African American religious history. The discussion seeks to engage multiple audiences, highlighting Frazier's enduring legacy and the ongoing relevance of his scholarship in contemporary discourse.
This session explores contexts and practices regarding resistance and the oppression of people on the move across diverse countries. The cases examine a spectrum of circumstances including resistance against deportation, countering hate crimes, and the decolonialization of refugee relief. Throughout these contexts, the theological agency of people on the move is presented, including their choice to change religions through conversion. The papers in this session highlight theological agency as a core concern for ethics, politics, and the study of religion.
This roundtable panel is inspired by the late work of Rebert Bellah, especially through engaging with the new edited volume Challenging Modernity (Columbia UP, 2024), in which social theorists and scholars of religion debate the question of religion in modernity, which has been central to Bellah’s work. The theme of the panel is the seeming contradictions between the transcendent aspirations of religion and the social and political perils we now face in the global 21st century. How to deal with the tension between the transcendental, universalizing ambitions of democracy and the restricting exigences of time, place, and function? What does transcendence mean when it is nurtured by for-profit capitalism? What is the relationship between political, religious, economic, and intellectual classes in the global Muslim communities? The panel includes two original members of the “Habits of the Heart” group as well as three leading sociologists of religion.
Latinx religion in the world is shifting in response to the proliferation of what Ann Swidler once called "unsettled lives." In this co-sponsored session of the Sociology of Religion and Religion in the Latina/o Americas, panelists will explore the dimensions of this unsettling of Latinx religion across the U.S., its borderlands, Latin America and Europe. Panelists will interrogate the literary tradition of Santa Muerte, how faith-based actors engage with Latin American queer refugees in Spain and the U.S., and how Latino Christians have integrated into the New Apostolic Reformation and its Christian nationalist support for Donald Trump.
This panel examines how religiously unaffiliated people create meaning and community online, in scientific work, and in nature. The first paper draws on interviews with atheist, agnostic, and secular humanist social media influencers to explore how they curate self-expression, community engagement, and authenticity. The second paper utilizes interviews with non-religious scientists in India, Italy, the U.K., and the U.S. to explore how they think and talk about spiritual experiences, including how such experiences can give rise to attitudinal changes. The third paper uses ethnographic research amongst Australian community gardeners and bush regeneration groups to explore how environmental movements are ripe sites to study lived nonreligion, finding that grassroots environmentalists cultivate enchantment, moral visions, and political commitments.
This panel explores gender and religion in a variety of contexts using diverse methods. The first paper relies on a global survey of Christian churches to explore women’s participation and gendered dynamics in church life, with comparisons across countries. The second paper uses a field experiment to explore whether an applicant’s acknowledgement of past sexual misconduct affects opportunities for pastoral employment in Protestant churches, with surprising findings. Using qualitative interviews, the third paper examines how religious involvement can be a potent resource for Black mothers embedded in a rural, predominantly Black community as they navigate a fragmented maternal health care system and reproductive trauma. The fourth paper employs ethnographic fieldwork in India, Canada, and the U.S. among Hindu Adhiparasakthi communities to investigate the role of women’s leadership in sustaining religious communities locally in a transnational context.
How do Christians understand the question, “What makes a good marriage?” How do evangelicals and Catholics alike frame this question and how do they answer it in our contemporary moment, when Christians are concerned that the institution of marriage is on life support? And, what does studying these questions reveal about how Christians navigate gender, sexuality, and intimacy as they practice their lived religion? Courtney Ann Irby’s insightful new book *Guiding God’s Marriage: Faith and Social Change in Premarital Counseling* (New York University Press, May 2024) answers these questions and more through rich qualitative analysis. This roundtable panel gathers sociologists of religion and historians of religion, gender, and sexuality to amplify its important contributions to the sociology of religion specifically and the study of religion more broadly.
