ABSTRACT
Religious belief is one of the United States’ hot-button topics. It matters, as Stephen Carter says above, to a lot of people. For educational leaders, understanding religion, particularly as it intersects with race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and ability, presents an opportunity to develop a more nuanced and critical understanding of the communities they serve. The United States is a slightly more religious country than most others in the world, whether measured by weekly attendance at a religious service or religious belief or daily prayer. Sociologists have speculated about why the number of people “unaffiliated” with a religious tradition has been increasing. The most popular theory is the “secularization thesis,” which states that as countries grow more modern, they become more secular and less religious because religion is less relevant to modern life.
