ABSTRACT
Thinking about religion in the United States soon runs into the problem of its definition. The popular conception, taken for granted by most people, is that religion is a private matter, a special kind of personal experience. This is sometimes said to be contact with a spiritual realm of reality, sometimes expressed as an encounter with the spirit or power of God, and sometimes experienced as a personal transformation. Studies of religion defined in this way tend toward psychologies of religion, and there are many self-help guides to spiritual wholeness that regard religion mainly as a matter of personal experience. This way of thinking about religion accords with our focus on persons as individuals. It is this concept of religion as a private and personal matter that has made it possible to think of the United States as a “Christian nation” even while concurring with the doctrine of the separation of church and state.
