Christian Smith, with Melinda Denton. 2005. Soul Searching: The Religious And Spiritual Lives Of American Teenagers. Oxford University Press.

From Publishers Weekly: "Encyclopedic in scope and exhaustive in detail, this study offers an impressive array of data, statistics and concluding hypotheses about American teenage religious identity, with appendixes explaining methodology and extensive endnotes. Sociologists of religion at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Smith and Denton cover a range of topics: e.g., 'mapping' religious affiliations, creating new categories to describe teenage spirituality, exploring why Catholic teens are largely apathetic. All the book's findings derive from interviews conducted with teenagers for the National Study of Youth and Religion. Interestingly and against popular belief, Smith and Denton conclude that the 'spiritual but not religious' affiliation thought to be widespread among young adults is actually rare among Americans under 18, and that the greatest influence shaping teens' religious beliefs is their parents. Despite the personal tone adopted in the first chapter and the topic's wide appeal, readers should be prepared to wade through lengthy presentations of research findings. Most helpful are summaries appearing in bullet form within several chapters, providing accessible and succinct overviews of the raw information and statistics. Regardless of whether this research will be 'a catalyst for many soul-searching conversations in various communities and organizations" among parents and pastors, scholars will surely agree that this study advances the conversation about contemporary adolescent spirituality.'" (Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

What kind of animals are human beings? And how do our visions of the human shape our theories of social action and institutions? This book advances a theory of human persons and culture that offers innovative, challenging answers to these and other fundamental questions in sociological, cultural, and religious theory. Smith suggests that human beings have a peculiar set of capacities and proclivities that distinguishes them significantly from other animals on this planet. Despite the vast differences in humanity between cultures and across history, no matter how differently people narrate their lives and histories, there remains an underlying structure of human personhood that helps to order human culture, history, and narration. Drawing on important recent insights in moral philosophy, epistemology, and narrative studies, the book argues that humans are animals who have an inescapable moral and spiritual dimension. They cannot avoid a fundamental moral orientation in life and this has profound consequences for how sociology must study human beings.

Sociologists, historians, and other social observers have long considered the secularization of American public life over the past hundred and thirty years to be an inevitable and natural outcome of modernization. This groundbreaking work rejects this view and fundamentally rethinks the historical and theoretical causes of the secularization of American public life between 1870 and 1930. The authors boldly argue that the declining authority of religion was not the by-product of modernization, but rather the intentional achievement of cultural and intellectual elites, including scientists, academics, and literary intellectuals, seeking to gain control of social institutions and increase their own cultural authority. Writing with broad intellectual grasp, the contributors examine power struggles and ideological shifts in various social sectors where the public authority of religion has diminished, in particular education, science, law, and journalism. Together the essays depict a cultural and institutional revolution that is best understood in terms of individual agency, conflicts of interest, resource mobilization, and struggles for authority. Engaging both sociological and historical literature, The Secular Revolution offers a new theoretical framework and original empirical research that will inform our understanding of American society from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. 

In recent decades Protestant evangelicalism has become a conspicuous- and to many Americans, a worrisome- part of this country's cultural and political landscape.  But just how unified is the supposed constituency of the Christian Coalition?  And who exactly are the people the Christian Right claims to represent?  In the most extensive study of American evangelicals ever conducted, Christian Smith explores the beliefs, values, commitments, and goals of the ordinary men and women who make up this often misunderstood religious group.  The result is a much-needed contribution to the discussion of issues surrounding fundamental American freedoms and the basic identity of the United States as a pluralistic nation. 

Based on data from a three-year national study, including more than 200 in-depth interviews of evangelicals around the country, Christian America? assesses the common stereotype of evangelicals as right-wing, intolerant religious zealots seeking to impose a Christian moral order through political force.  What Smith finds instead are people vastly more diverse and ambivalent than this stereotype suggests.  On issues such as religion in education, "family values," Christian political activism, and tolerance of other religions and moralities, evangelicals are highly disparate and conflicted.  As the voices of interviewees make clear, the labels "conservative" and "liberal" are too simplistic for understanding their approaches to public life and political action. 

Smith also finds many more differences between evangelicals than might be expected from the common image portrayed in the media.  Not only do evangelical leaders range across the political and ideological map, but their constituents don't necessarily follow them lock-step on every issue. 

Moving beyond the characterizations of evangelicals as seen from the outside, Smith gets inside their world and listens attentively to its multitude of conflicted voices.  What he presents is a carefully assembled cultural analysis that does much to explain who evangelicals are, what they want for America, and how they hope to get it. 

In recent years, the leaders of the American evangelical movement have brought their characteristic passion to the problem of race, notably in the Promise Keepers movement and in reconciliation theology.  But the authors of this provocative new study reveal that, despite their good intentions, evangelicals may actually be preserving America's racial chasm.

In Divided by Faith, Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith probe the grassroots of white evangelical America, through a nationwide telephone survey of 2,000 people, along with 200 face-to-face interviews.  The results of their research are surprising.  They learned that most white evangelicals see no systematic discrimination against blacks; indeed, they deny the existence of any ongoing racial problem in the United States.  Many of their subjects blamed the continuing talk of racial conflict on the media, unscrupulous black leaders, and the inability of African Americans to forget the past.  What lies behind this perception?  Evangelicals, Emerson and Smith write, are not so much actively racist as committed to a theological view of the world.  Therefore, it is difficult for them to see systematic injustice.  The evangelical emphasis on individualism, free will, and personal relationships makes invisible the pervasive injustice that perpetuates inequality between the races.  Most racial problems, they told the authors, can be solved by the repentance and conversion of the sinful individuals at fault.

Combining a substantial body of evidence with sophisticated analysis and interpretation, Emerson and Smith throw sharp light on the oldest American dilemma.  Despite the best intentions of evangelical leaders and some positive trends, the authors conclude that real racial reconciliation remains far over the horizon.

Based on a national survey and hundreds of personal interviews with evangelicals and other churchgoing Protestants, this study provides a detailed analysis of the commitments, beliefs, concerns, and practices of this thriving group.  Examining how evangelicals interact with and attempt to influence secular society, this book argues that traditional, orthodox evangelicalism endures not despite, but precisely because of, the challenges and structures of our modern pluralistic environment.  This work also looks beyond evangelicalism to explore more broadly the problems and prospects for traditional religious belief and practice in the modern world.

A comprehensive analysis of the U.S. Central America peace movement, Resisting Reagan explains why more than one hundred thousand U.S. citizens marched in the streets, illegally housed refugees, traveled to Central American war zones, committed civil disobedience, and hounded their political representatives to contest the Reagan administration's policy of sponsoring wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador. 

Focusing on the movement's three most important national campaigns-- Witness for Peace, Sanctuary, and the Pledge of Resistance-- this book demonstrates the centrality of morality as a political motivator, highlights the importance of political opportunities in movement outcomes, and examines the social structuring of insurgent consciousness.  Based on extensive surveys, interviews, and document research, Resisting Reagan makes significant contributions to our understanding of the formation of individual activist identities, of media discourse, and of religious resources for political activism.

Liberation theology is a school of Roman Catholic thought that emerged in the late 1960s in Latin America.  Teaching that a primary duty of the church must be to promote social and economic justice, liberation theologians have committed the institutional church to the poor and created a radically new model of church pastoral work.  The movement has produced progressive and revolutionary laity and clergy who have fostered active opposition to political regimes in numerous Latin American nations, resulting in the arrests, exile, torture, and murder of thousands of lay leaders, clergy, and bishops.  The liberation theology movement has also provoked a restructuring of the church institution itself, a change which continues to spread worldwide. 

In this book, Christian Smith explains how and why the liberation theology movement emerged and succeeded when and where it did.  He uses interviews, texts, historical documents, and statistics, culled from research conducted in North America, England, Central, and South America, to create the first comprehensive social history of the movement from 1930 to the present.  Using the political process model- a theory explaining the emergence of social movements- Smith analyzes the complex of social, political, organizational, and ideological forces and events which generated and sustain liberation theology.

Latin America is experiencing a genuine pluralization of faith.  This interdisciplinary volume tracks those changes, from the perspective of such diverse fields as sociology, anthropology, religious studies, political science, and Latin American studies.  The contributors tackle such issues as creolization, esoterica, and Afro-Brazilian religion in a highly accessible way.  Latin American Religion in Motion provides not only a clear sense of the extent of the transformations now under way, but also provides insight into some of the most pressing issues surrounding these momentous changes. 

Religion has long played a central role in many social and political movements.  Solidarity in Poland, anti-apartheid in South Africa, Operation Rescue in the United States - each of these movements is driven by the energy and sustained by the commitment of many individuals and organizations whose ideologies are shaped and powered by religious faith.  In many cases, religious resources and motives serve as crucial variables explaining the emergence of entire social movements. 

Despite the crucial role of religion in most societies, this religious activism remains largely uninvestigated.  Disruptive Religion fills this void by analyzing contemporary social movements which are driven by people and organizations of faith.  Upon a firm base of empirical evidence, these essays also address many theoretical issues arising in the study of social movements and disruptive politics.