Being Religious, American Style: A History of Popular Religiosity in the United States by Charles H. Lippy (review)

Being Religious, American Style: A History of Popular Religiosity in the United States. By Charles H. Lippy. (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. 1994. Pp. x, 284. $65.00; $19.95 paperback.) This book is an ambitious attempt to trace the history of "popular" religion among the American people from the colonial period to the present. Much attention is given to European settlers in America, but pages are also devoted to native peoples and African Americans. For individuals whose understanding of American religion may lie solely on texts that tell the story of religion in America from the perspective of religious institutions, this book could be a revelation. Lippy sees "popular religiosity" as "that inchoate, unorganized, and highly syncretistic sense of the supernatural" (p. 17), and believes that the search for this sensibility about the supernatural has been "a constant in American culture" (p. 17). Lippy points out this supernatural element in a number of unrelated religious examples throughout the book, suggesting to the reader that the groups and individuals he uses as evidence all share a similar understanding or characterization of the supernatural in their lives. Indeed, the interest in the supernatural may be very significant and a common element within popular religiosity, but the specific apprehension and expression of the supernatural may vary quite considerably from one example of personal religiosity to the next. Religious lives are too complex to reduce the personal religious understanding and experience of all individuals and communities of individuals to a few simple, detectable characteristics. As much as I admire and enthusiastically commend Lippy's attempt to construct a history of American popular religion, I was troubled by his method for writing this history. Lippy sees popular religion and its history as a companion or complement of institutional religion and its history. But popular religion is so much more; it is the religious history of the American people! I was hoping that Lippy would offer a more radical or creative approach to this history in his book. As for his overall linear approach to this material (from the Great Awakening and Revolution to Antebellum America, Nineteenth Century, the two World Wars, etc.), I have always felt that the important lesson that the study of popular religion teaches scholars is that histories based on such linear schemes can be a fiction. Linear narratives of American religion are not necessarily helpful in uncovering, understanding, or interpreting how people actually lived their religious lives. As a part of his linear design, Lippy uses major events as the foundation for his history such as wars, theological disputes, ecclesiastical or governmental decisions. He offers a history of popular religion as peoples' religious reactions to institutional norms, dogmas, decisions, functionaries, hierarchical individuals within institutions. Popular religion, therefore, is not valued as an important history in and of itself, but as the residual history of believers living in relation to their religious institutions. …