ABSTRACT
The role played by religious thought and practice is of immense import - ance to a full understanding of American life. As Anthony Giddens has argued, religion is a ‘central part of human experience, influencing how we perceive and react to the environments in which we live’ (Giddens 2001: 530). Social surveys suggest how importantly this is reflected in the contemporary United States. In 2008, 92 per cent of Americans said they believed in God, 63 per cent said they belonged to a church of some kind, and 39 per cent attended a weekly church service. Another 56 per cent believed religion was very important in their lives, and answered their problems (Pew 2008). In 2005 a Gallup poll showed that 81 per cent of Americans believed in heaven and 70 per cent believed in hell. Most Americans were pretty sure where they were headed: 77 per cent thought their chances of getting to heaven were good to excellent, and only 6 per cent felt they were likely to go to hell (Gallup 2004b). By comparison 38 per cent of Germans, 44 per cent of Britons and 54 per cent of Italians believed in life after death. Half of the population claimed they prayed at least once a day. In contrast only 10 per cent of Americans in 2004 admitted to no religious preference, or being atheistic or agnostic. Only 15 per cent felt religion was not very important in their lives (Gallup 2004a). Belief was matched by financial commitment, with contributions to religion estimated at $57 billion a year in the mid-1990s (Singh 2003: 192-215). ‘There is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America’, wrote de Tocqueville in 1835 (1965: 233), but his comment might equally apply to the contemporary republic. What further complicates the picture today, of course, is that Christianity has been joined by a number of other religions to make the American religious mosaic much more varied than it was in the mid nineteenth century. The great waves of Jewish immigra - tion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made the United States a major centre of Judaism. In the twentieth century a range of other religions have grown significantly including Islam, and a host of New Religious Movements, incorporating a wide range of cults, sects, and
other spiritual groups (Giddens 2001: 553). They have also been joined by a host of new ethnic religious groupings stimulated by changing patterns of immigration from Asia and Latin America.
