“Race” Speech---“Culture” Speech---“Soul” Speech: The Brief Career of Social-Science Language in American Religion during the Fascist Era (2004)
Rose, Anne C. (Author)
Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation
Volume: 14
Pages: 83--108
Beginning in the 1920s, American religious liberals borrowed language from the social sciences to describe the social experience of religion. Wishing to foster tolerance at a time when ethnic hatreds increasingly controlled world politics, they tried to drop the word race as the equivalent for a religious community and instead depict religions as cultural units by substituting terms like group. This was part of a broad intellectual transition in the free West. Long-standing biological models of society, assuming racial differences, gave way to explanations of human behavior emphasizing acquired traits. In this way, democratic cultures, confronting fascism, reaffirmed the malleability and equality of peoples and rejected determinism and hierarchy. American religious liberals of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish backgrounds, committed to ecumenism and attentive to secular ideas, readily appropriated the new idiom. By the 1940s, talk of Nordic, Celtic, and Jewish races, among others, was rare, and the three mainstream religions, pictured as bearers of values, were praised as democracy's building blocks. Yet, because religion serves private needs and transcendent aspirations as well as society, this romance with social-science functionalism was short-lived. It was a small step from lauding religions as comparable and compromising to missing their distinctiveness, and a mood of traditionalism, expressed in humanistic, often biblically informed words, gained ground after World War II. This was not a simple speech revolution, however. Rhetoric that cast religions as social equivalents had enhanced the climate of freedom, to the point that religious minorities re-explored their heritages with unprecedented confidence. Social-science words set stage for their own subversion. This account of linguistic borrowing suggests the utility of considering religion as one language system among others in a complex culture. In this view, religious rhetoric is a public embodiment of values situated to interact with secular speech, making word use a sensitive meter of religious transformation.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Thesis
Jamil W. Drake;
(2015)
To Know The Soul Of the People: The Field Study of the "Folk Negro" and The Making of Popular Religion in Modern America, 1924-1945
(/isis/citation/CBB248207346/)
Book
Cole, Sally Cooper;
(2003)
Ruth Landes: A Life in Anthropology
(/isis/citation/CBB000470721/)
Thesis
Gonaver, Wendy;
(2012)
The Peculiar Institution: Gender, Race and Religion in the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1842--1932
(/isis/citation/CBB001561028/)
Chapter
Sergei, Glebov;
(2003)
Science, Culture, and Empire: Eurasianism as a Modernist Movement
(/isis/citation/CBB000750362/)
Chapter
Valensi, Lucette;
(2000)
Intercommunal Relations and Changes in Religious Affiliation in the Middle East, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries
(/isis/citation/CBB000102248/)
Book
Wheeler-Barclay, Marjorie;
(2010)
The Science of Religion in Britain, 1860--1915
(/isis/citation/CBB001033223/)
Thesis
Ahuja, Neel;
(2008)
Cultures of Quarantine: Race, U.S. Empire, and the Biomedical Discourse of National Security, 1893--1960
(/isis/citation/CBB001561238/)
Article
Josephson, Jason Ãnanda;
(2013)
God's Shadow: Occluded Possibilities in the Genealogy of “Religion”
(/isis/citation/CBB001320650/)
Article
Zenderland, Leila;
(2013)
Social Science as a “Weapon of the Weak”: Max Weinreich, the Yiddish Scientific Institute, and the Study of Culture, Personality, and Prejudice
(/isis/citation/CBB001321222/)
Book
Jackson, John P.;
(2001)
Social Scientists for Social Justice: Making the Case against Segregation
(/isis/citation/CBB000201428/)
Article
Gordon, Leah N.;
(2010)
The Individual and “The General Situation”: The Tension Barometer and the Race Problem at the University of Chicago, 1947--1954
(/isis/citation/CBB000932858/)
Book
Autumn Womack;
(2022)
The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930
(/isis/citation/CBB242416698/)
Article
Weller, Dylan;
(2010)
William James, Pluralism, and the Science of Religious Experience
(/isis/citation/CBB001032381/)
Article
Green, S. J. D.;
(2008)
Social Science and the Discovery of a “Post-Protestant People”: Rowntree's Surveys of York and Their Other Legacy
(/isis/citation/CBB001030792/)
Book
Michele Bonmassar;
(2019)
Diritto e razza. Gli italiani in Africa
(/isis/citation/CBB090469677/)
Chapter
Dixon, Thomas;
(2001)
The Psychology of the Emotions in Britain and America in the Nineteenth Century: The Role of Religious and Antireligious Commitments
(/isis/citation/CBB000101146/)
Article
Brewer, John D.;
(2007)
Sociology and Theology Reconsidered: Religious Sociology and the Sociology of Religion in Britain
(/isis/citation/CBB000773665/)
Book
Belzen, Jacob A. van;
(1999)
Van Gisteren tot Heden
(/isis/citation/CBB000358457/)
Article
Crone, Anna Lisa;
(2009)
Christianizing Freud: Sublimation and Creativity in Modern Russian Religious Thought
(/isis/citation/CBB001030520/)
Thesis
Hogan, Edward M.;
(2001)
Whether Theology Is a Science?
(/isis/citation/CBB001560923/)
Be the first to comment!