The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture is a research and public outreach institute devoted to the promotion of the understanding of the relation between religion and other features of American culture. Established in 1989, the Center is based in the IU School of Liberal Arts at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Now with forty research fellows, the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture is considered the premier research institute in the nation working in American religious studies.

IUPUI Campus Center

Center Programs, Activities, and Publications

Center activities include national conferences and symposia, books, essays, bibliographies and research projects, fellowships for young scholars, data-based communication about developments in the field of American religion, a newsletter devoted to the promotion of Center activities, and the semiannual scholarly periodical Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, which is among the highest-ranked academic journals in the nation.

Since its founding, the Center has influenced the field of American religious studies in multiple ways. On an academic level, it led the way in understanding religious pluralism with national conferences that “de-centered” religion. By placing Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and non-mainstream beliefs, behaviors, and rituals together in fashioning an analysis of American religion, the Center helped to increase scholarly and public understandings of the diversity of the American religious experience and established entirely new views from which to study religion in America.

As a public teaching venue, the Center for the Study of Religion and American culture has been unmatched by any other for nearly two decades. Journalists around the globe consistently turn to its officers for their insights about events in the United States. Print, radio, and television journalists interview the Center’s officers and research fellows hundreds of times annually. With seminars for young college, university, and seminary professors, the Center promotes better research and teaching about American religion by faculty. These sessions result in increased awareness and understanding of the diversity of American religious life and the manifold forms in which religion reveals itself in culture (and culture in religion) for thousands of students across the country.

"The New Evangelical Social Engagement," a Public Forum, with opening comments by Joel Carpenter, Calvin College; Glen Stassen, Fuller Theological Seminary; and R. Stephen Warner, University of Illinois-Chicago

Saturday, May 19, 2012, 10:30 a.m., IUPUI University Library, Lilly Auditorium, 755 W. Michigan Street, Indianapolis, IN.

This public forum culminates a private workshop of scholars studying the fact that in recent years, evangelical Protestants have increasingly turned their energies toward issues such as homelessness, poverty, urban renewal, sustainable development, climate change, racial reconciliation, HIV/Aids, human trafficking, peacemaking, and the like, marking a shift in social priorities when compared to past decades. Evangelicals themslves realize that there is change afoot, and some scholars have recognized this trend anecdotally, but there has yet to be a sustained academic effort to explore it. Fourteen scholars will gather in Indianapolis to present their work on this topic, and this forum will allow for interaction and discussion with them.

The recent trends in social engagement among American evangelicals look new from the vantage point of the twentieth century, but they are also a return to the historical roots of evangelicalism. The birth of evangelicalism in the United States dates to the mid-eighteenth century. From the outset, evangelicals combined an emphasis on transforming individuals’ spiritual lives with a commitment to reforming social institutions to better reflect their ideals. This commitment to reform could be seen throughout the nineteenth century in areas ranging from abolitionism and temperance to educational and labor reforms. Changes in the early twentieth century mark what became known as the “Great Reversal,” when conservative Protestants (soon to be labeled “fundamentalists”) largely ceased their efforts at social reform to focus exclusively on witnessing to non-believers and enforcing doctrinal orthodoxy. The 1940s gave rise to the “neo-evangelical” movement and what we now call modern evangelicalism. Mainstream evangelicals sought to redeem society, but by saving souls, not by transforming social institutions. Direct social engagement was explicitly proscribed by evangelical leaders of the era. (This prohibition was not without dissenters, but it represented the dominant evangelical viewpoint of the era.) Views changed with the rise of the “New Christian Right” and the close ties that evangelicals developed with the Republican Party. Evangelical activists and their followers sought to influence legislative reform and electoral politics, but their agenda was devoted to issues related to gender, sexuality, and public education—abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, prayer in public schools, and civil rights for gays and lesbians. 

Seen against this historical backdrop, recent trends in evangelical social engagement mark a significant departure from evangelical priorities over the past century. This new social engagement runs contrary to the evangelical prohibitions against direct social action in the postwar era, and its focal issues differ sharply from the set of issues taken up by the New Christian Right beginning in the 1980s. Evangelicals have been at the forefront of the struggle for human rights across Africa and have launched a set of initiatives to combat the human causes of global warming. They have initiated local campaigns against homelessness and formulated economic development strategies for urban renewal. These examples illustrate broader trends:  the overall increase in evangelical social activism at both the domestic and international levels, and the new set of issues that have captured evangelical energies in recent years.

Please contact the Center by calling 317-274-8409 or by email at raac@iupui.edu if you have questions about this event.

Center Receives Award to Study the Bible in American Life

How do Americans use the Bible in their personal lives, and how do other influences, including religious communities and the internet, shape individuals’ comprehension of scripture? What is the Bible’s role outside of worship, in the lived religion of Americans, both now and in the past?

The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture is pleased to announce that it has received an award from Lilly Endowment to study these and other questions about the role of Biblical scripture in American life.

The project will be divided into two main stages, the first of which will have both quantitative and qualitative components that will serve the second stage, a national conference to be held on the topic in 2014. The project will culminate with the publication of at least two books, one by the project’s principal investigators, and the second an edited volume of expanded papers presented at the conference.

This year, 2011, marks the 400th Anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible. The Center is very excited to undertake this study of its influence, significance, and importance in American life and culture.

2011 Conference Proceedings Available for Download

Panelist Kathleen Flake of Vanderbilt University answers a question during the discussion following her presentation at the 2nd Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture.

The Second Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture was held in Indianapolis in June 2011 at the JW Marriott Hotel in Indianapolis. Consisting of a series of roundtable discussions through presentations by top scholars from a variety of perspectives, the 2011 conference continued the conversation that began with the 2009 conference. Nationally known scholars from different backgrounds participated in each session. The panelists sat, quite literally, at a round table in the center of the room, surrounded by over one hundred scholars on risers so everyone could not only learn from the conversation, but also participate in it.

These Proceedings include all of the papers that were read at the conference. What is missing, however, are the lively and spirited conversations that marked each session. Indeed, the discussions continued over coffee breaks, lunches, and dinners. New friends were made and fresh ideas were discovered. While there is room for growth and improvement, the conference is gaining strength as more disciplines and backgrounds are brought to the table. We look forward to that in 2013.

As you will see in these Proceedings, the overarching theme of our second biennial conference was “change.”  We were interested in the changing understandings of both religion and culture, as well as the effects these changes have on the ways of thinking about religion’s role in American culture.

Download 2011 Proceedings
Download 2009 Proceedings

Signature Center News

The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture, along with the Binational/Cross-Cultural Health Enhancement Center, the Center for Earth and Environmental Science, PREGMED: Pharmacogenetics and Therapeutics Research, and the Service Learning Research Collaborative, was recently awarded another three years of funding under IUPUI's Signature Center Initiative. The extended funding follows a review of the Center's first three years holding the Signature Center designation.

An IUPUI Signature Center is a research unit disintinctly identifiable with the campus. In addition to representing an area of research strength, the center builds on ongoing activities and has attributes which include being interdisciplinary in character, having the capacity to attract significant external funding, and bringing academic distinction to the campus.