Develop a critical report based on a selected article or chapter read during the course

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Develop a critical report based on a selected article or chapter read during the course. Your report should contain two essential elements: first, it should present clearly the main ideas developed in the selected article or chapter. Second, the report must include a critique of the selected text that explains its implications, strengths, and weaknesses. The report must have at most two pages. Your report must include the complete bibliographical reference of the selected material.

Article: 

Beyond Diversity and Multiculturalism:
Pluralism and the Globalization of American Religion
For centuries, America has hosted an array of complex and sometimes violent encounters among diverse peoples. In recent times, the realities of rapid political, social, economic, and technological modernization have generated a state of affairs labeled globalization, including closer contact and relationships with other parts of the world than ever before. This increased contact often leads to cooperation and new alliances, but just as often fosters conflict and hostility. Observers and experts had much to say about globalization's effects on various dimensions of American culture. Social scientists, for instance, have developed instruments for measuring international trade and development, and their consequences for U.S. patterns of consumption and for the economy more generally. The outcome for religion is no less vast, as changing demographics and modes of communication, and the new exchanges accompanying them, have generated enormous shifts not only in congregational life but in the very ways that Americans talk and think about religion. How, then, do we measure American religiosity in a global age? And how do we teach students to understand it?
One approach is simply to focus on poll numbers, which consistently show high levels of religious belief and practice across the nation, in urban, suburban, and rural areas alike. For instance, a commonly noted statistic from the 2004 General Social Survey, which biennially collects data in face-to-face interviews, is this: 95.3 percent of all Americans claim to believe in God. Other figures from the same survey show high rates of U.S. citizens claiming to pray daily, to believe in life after death, and to find strength in their religion most days or every day (though other numbers show an equally strong skepticism toward organized religion itself) (1). But beyond confirming what many observers already know—that Americans in general are quite religious, far more so than any other modern Western nation and serving as a kind of conversation-starter for students new to the historical study of American religion, it is debatable whether such numbers alone say anything significant. Survey questions lack nuance, and responses to them typically fail to capture historical and cultural context essential for understanding the changing contours of our nation's religious makeup, including what people really mean when they claim to be "religious" and how religious attachments shift over time. Above all, they tell us very little about what we know to be one of the most fascinating religious realities of our time, namely, the globalization of American religion and its attendant challenges.
What can we say about religious diversity and multiplicity in the nation today, and what should students know? Again, surveys tell us some things, though not all that teachers may deem important. Another oft cited statistic, this one verified in a handful of well regarded
quantitative studies, casts the percentage of Christians in the U.S. (including Protestants, Catholics, and a wide array of breakaway groups) at around eighty percent of the total population. Taken as the sole measure of religiosity, the picture would lead us to believe that the remaining groups—Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Pagan, and so forth—individually comprise only a tiny percentage of the American population. But these numbers, if taken too literally, may also lead us astray: surveyors themselves note that some groups are undercounted because of the fact that surveys have tended to draw in only English speakers, not to mention the fact that most surveys are conducted over the phone. It is also true that the high number of Christians includes countless thousands of people who have not darkened the door of a church in years and whose affiliation is more of a cultural than a religious one. Even if one considers the survey data mostly accurate, however, the rise in numbers of Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists in recent decades is striking; and all observers agree that those numbers are still increasing. From the historian's point of view, American religious diversity has long been underestimated. Dissenters, mystics, eclectic spiritual borrowers, restless seekers, and theological innovators have always comprised an important part of the American religious landscape, making up what one historian of American religion has termed the "oneness and the manyness of American religion." If by "oneness," observers mean to convey the traditional public role played by Protestantism in our nation's social and legal history, the "manyness" denotes the many other ways of being religious that Americans have invented or adopted over time. We have always, in this sense, been a nation of religious seekers, one in which the spirit of independence and individualism has led to the burgeoning of new and radical religious movements, such as the Mormons and the Millerites (later Seventhday Adventists, from whom the Branch Davidians descended), Oneida Perfectionists and Transcendentalists, Christian Scientists and New Thought meditators, and many more. The sheer fact of religious multiplicity and diversity has not, of course, inspired wholesale celebration. Indeed, the thoughtful commitment to honoring and working with rather than against religious diversity—a commitment that advocates distinguish as "pluralism"—has always been a fragile ideal, one seldom achieved in public life (3).
But the situation of religious diversity today is more than a mere intensification of diversity patterns visible since the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Major changes have occurred in recent decades that render the contemporary scene religiously unique. These changes include new immigration patterns in the wake of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965; new models of interreligious encounter, cooperation, and conflict that have arisen in the wake of the new media culture spawned at midcentury and accelerating since the 1990s; and an increasing emphasis in many religious communities upon transnationalism and global concerns (4). We live, as a result of these and other changes, in an era of irrefutable religious globalization, one in which traditions such as Mormonism, Pentecostalism, and Islam continue
to grow at explosive rates throughout the world and in which religious groups continue to multiply and encounter one another within our own nation's borders. In the wake of these tidal shifts that have taken place since the 1950s, the United States stands today as a spiritual mirror of the world's religions. To understand just how much things have changed, no benchmark is more revealing than the best-known commentary on religion from the 1950s: Will Herberg's highly influential book, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (1955). Herberg offered a critique of American patterns of assimilation to what he called a "triple melting pot," in which religious identity gradually replaced ethnic identity for a majority of Americans and where conformity to the "American way of life" was the highest norm, indeed the "common religion" of American society. Mainstream forms of Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism in the U.S., Herberg argued, all tended to emphasize such conformity in a way that was both overly nationalistic and individually self-serving in a word, he thundered, "idolatrous."
The American is a religious man, and in many cases personally humble and conscientious. But religion as he understands it is not something that makes for humility or the uneasy conscience: it is something that reassures him about the essential rightness of everything American, his nation, his culture, and himself; something that validates his goals and his ideals instead of calling them into question; something that enhances his self-regard instead of challenging it; something that feeds his self-sufficiency instead of shattering it; something that offers him salvation on easy terms instead of demanding repentance and a "broken heart."
While Herberg's thesis had much to commend it (and arguably still does), the book in no way considered alternative models of religion extant in the range of groups located outside the borders of traditional Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish identity. Already, Americans had encountered (and sometimes converted to) Hinduism through the personage of Swami Vivekananda, who stayed in the U.S. to form Vedanta Societies after the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago; and many would also become familiar with eclectic adaptations of Zen Buddhism as popularized by Jack Kerouac and other Beat writers of his generation. But such movements appeared wholly marginal to Herberg and others of his time. African American Protestants did not fi t Herberg's paradigm either, as he acknowledged somewhat uneasily; and he did not account for black Catholics, Jews, or Muslims at all (5).
Today, our understanding of religion during the 1950s encompasses all of these groups plus many others not considered by Herberg; and Herberg's model for understanding religion in American life appears, however incisive about nationalistic and self-focused trends in particular strands of American religion, nonetheless, rather limited in scope. Already brewing in the 1950s were early signs of the later upheavals in American life that would sharply alter the complacent
model of midcentury religion that Herberg found so troubling. The civil rights movement embodied the very opposite of religious complacency, drawing strength and inspiration from religious leaders, black and white, whose reading of scripture and tradition undergirded their convictions about faith and social justice. Inspired in some measure by civil rights language of identity, pride, and personhood, other liberationist movements arose inside religious circles. Women revisited the gender hierarchies in their traditions, in hopes of ridding these faiths of sexist prejudices; some stayed within religious institutions to work for positive change, while others pioneered new varieties of egalitarian spiritual community. Religious homosexuals established gay caucuses within traditional institutions as well as forming gay-friendly organizations outside them. These developments, quite visible and dramatic at the time, generated reactions that were no less divided than the civil rights movement itself had inspired.
Meanwhile, out of the spotlight, other transformative changes were also taking place. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 smoothed the way for waves of new immigrants whose movement here had long been restricted. New arrivals particularly from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East generated an upsurge of religions that were outside the historical American mainstream. Over the course of forty years, the numbers of Buddhists and Muslims, in particular, rose noticeably; and numbers of immigrants who are Hindu have accelerated rapidly in recent years as well. Gradually, in major cities across the country and in a notable smattering of suburbs, there rose Islamic mosques, Buddhist shrines, and Hindu temples catering to growing numbers of immigrants as well as their children and grandchildren. In short, while religious diversity had always been a part of the American landscape, after 1965 traditions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Islam became dramatically more visible.
The acceleration of Latino immigrants has, meanwhile, had important ramifi cations not only for American political and economic life, but also for religion. The Catholic Church in the U.S. has witnessed consistent growth in its Spanish-speaking membership, but so too have myriad Pentecostal churches, many of them growing from small storefronts to sizeable megachurches. Since many Asian immigrants also profess Christianity, it is by now quite ordinary to see Protestant and Catholic church buildings hosting numerous foreign language services. These immigrant populations have had a dramatic impact on Christianity in the U.S., as many of them practice a more fervent, charismatic form of worship than their staid Anglo-American counterparts. Growing numbers of African and Afro-Caribbean peoples have also shifted the nation's social and religious, both within traditions such as Christianity and Islam and also outside them. African-derived religions, such as Yoruba, Vodou, Candomblé, and Rastafarianism, have increasingly received exposure, if still appearing exotic or even demonic to some onlookers.
In terms of the changing media landscape, it is clear that the acceleration of cable and satellite television, not to mention the Internet, has generated vast changes in American religion no less than in other parts of our culture. Websites devoted to religious proselytizing, discussion, and debate have proliferated, as have catch-all sites such as <www.Beliefnet.com>. Religious themes have permeated a number of popular TV programs in recent years. Meanwhile, spirituality—a looser and more appealing term to many Americans today, connoting greater innovation and freedom (or, to critics, sloppiness and narcissism) than "religion" drives the self-help arm of the book industry; and explicitly religious books constitute one of the most lucrative arenas of the publishing industry today. Oprah Winfrey, through her extraordinarily successful media empire that she saturates with messages of spiritual empowerment, has palpably influenced religious talk outside institutional structures and contributed to this increasing commodification of spirituality. Popular culture, particularly that part that is dominated by youth, no longer avoids faith or considers it uncool. No simple process of secularization, these changes suggest a veritable repositioning of religious and secular categories in American culture and society, consonant with the seeker mentality that has long been part of our national culture.
Finally, in many areas of American religious life there has been a visible upsurge in attention to global issues, going beyond the traditional mission emphasis once stressed by Christian churches. September 11, of course, garnered much attention to Islam across the world; fear and anger spawned by both Osama bin Laden's violent attack and the bigoted acts perpetrated in its wake against many U.S. Muslims, have led to intense inter- and intra-religious debates about Islam. Conservative think tanks such as the Institute for Religion and Democracy have voiced strong critiques of liberal religion in the U.S., while articulating strong support for divisive and politically useful causes such as the Iraq war and a proposed Federal Marriage Amendment. But concern and compassion are also evident today in both conservative and liberal religious circles, as witnessed by the widespread attention in American religious circles to the crisis in Darfur and to the global catastrophe wreaked by AIDS. In these and many other global causes, American Christians and Jews have worked alongside Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, and other religious parties whom many would once have shunned and with whom they may continue to disagree theologically. Such cooperative ventures are hardly always happy ones, of course; the point here is to suggest that they are, nonetheless, occurring with greater frequency and hope than ever before.
Advocates of religious pluralism point to this array of dramatic encounters and collaborative work among disparate religious parties as proof that strong religious adherence begets not only violent conflict, but also dynamic partnerships across partisan lines. One hardly has to be a religious enthusiast, however, to appreciate the profound changes that have taken
place in American religious life since Herberg offered his critique of conformist religion (though Herberg would find plenty to denounce in much of mainstream religion today). Students living in a religiously diverse society need pedagogic guidance for understanding how this multiplicity came to be in a once Protestant-dominated land (6).
At the very least, it is no longer possible to describe the United States as a Judeo-Christian nation, as many Americans once thought of their country. Nor is it possible today to defend theories of secularization that once held sway, when it was believed that religious faith and practice would markedly decline in the U.S. and that religion's social prominence and cultural influence would likewise fade into obscurity. The themes of diversification, encounter, conflict, and pluralistic collaboration themes that I have found to be pedagogically useful in a variety of classroom settings—permeate American culture and religion today more than ever. As religion retains and even expands its crucial influence and power in many parts of the world, the globalizing effects on American society are likely to become ever more immense. This religious dynamism, whatever forms it takes, will continue to require educated discussion and debate within as well as beyond the classroom.