Mass has forever undergone a series of transformations, simple ones such as the priest facing the audience during mass, to more extravagant additions like blaring music and dance. This week, two presentations stood out to me, Shared Parish and Reinventing American Protestantism. One more than the other showed how traditional practices are changing in order to better engage the audience by appealing to different demographics of people based on either generational upbringing, or ethnic background.

Reinventing American Protestantism displayed perfectly how church has changed traditional service in order to engage a different generation of people. The new energetic movement of the uprising protestant church directly target the baby boomer generation in every aspect of its mass. Key attractions of the new style of mass are, reduced structure and a new age approach to delivering the sermon. The reduced traditional structure of mass includes expressing passion and one’s love of Jesus through loud music and lively dance rather than sitting quietly as a priest delivers the sermon. The preacher himself is not bound by traditional dress or lecturing styles. As the video presented depicted, the preacher has full creative liberty. These new programs have become increasingly popular and have grown substantially because of how appealing they are to the different generations.

In Shared Parish traditional mass in the United States has evolved to appeal and included those of different worshipping and language backgrounds. The anonymous parish reflects several across the country that have adapted, sometimes under contentious circumstances, to the increasing population and growing communities of immigrants.

In order to maintain its presence, churches must continuously adapt their appeal to keep membership. The two presentations this week show how just a couple of churches are adapting to the new age.

The social role of religion has long gone back and forth. Northern Ireland is a prime example as to how religion has and continues to divide people and tear societies apart. Across Northern Ireland the struggle between the Catholics and Protestants is clearly expressed in street art we saw, but the divide goes deeper influencing the development of different communities and the political structure as well. The argument could be made that though the larger community is torn apart, the smaller contending communities within are brought closer together. In contrast where religion tears societies apart, religion also holds societies together. Civil religion unites societies as it has done in the United States. The historical mythology of the United States binds citizens together, like the heroic stories of George Washington or Johnny Appleseed in the early legends of bravery surrounding the pioneer day. Civil religion is reflective of the society on a general basis, allowing each person to relate to the mythology and values at a rudimentary level and then build upon that belief, like American Exceptionalism. To each person of the United States American Exceptionalism means something different, but overall it is a general sense of pride and superiority of the United States, uniting the public behind that idea. Passionate Journeys further emphasizes the impact of religion to build a community. Women from all walks of life came and joined together around a singular belief system that has largely unified a previously nonexistent community. Whereas God Needs No Passport, contributes to the idea that conflicting outlooks on different religions threatens the societal makeup especially in the case of Alice in a particularly developing part of Massachusetts.

Across the United States religious groups have been changing in beliefs and practices in order to adapt to modern times. Different changes among different groups tend to be classified as either liberal or conservative based on attitudes towards adapting tradition to cultural changes, interpretations of the bible, and the organizations views of working with other religious groups. The evolving environment of traditional church life has led to a decrease in literalist, but also an increase in people who consider themselves spiritual but not religious, a considerable change to traditional church life in the United States. As had been present in the past the correlation between church goers and those who hold politically conservative or republican values has persisted, and in more recent times strengthened. Since 1992 the correlation between religiously active people and those who hold conservative political values or identify as republican has strengthened. Specifically, the correlation between weekly church attendees and political outlook on abortion, premarital sex, and homosexuality has strengthened at differing rates. In regards to legal abortion in any case regular church attendees have become significantly more conservative, though in regards to premarital sex and homosexuality, regular attendees have either remand the same of have even become more liberalized about the subject since the 1970s. The overall regular church going population though is still considered to be more conservative than not. In a greater sense, these trends continue to enforce that the shifting religious trends across the United States has a far reaching influence in all aspects of a person’s life.

Measuring religiosity in the developing American culture today in a truly meaningful way presents many problems, but from each difficulty, new information is uncovered. As recommended by Chaves, many survey respondents say they attended a religious service in the past week in order to assure the pollster of the person’s commitment to religion. Outwardly and traditionally, commitment to religion is expressed in service attendance. Though in regards to the information provided by the time journals allocated to respondents previous to the interview a majority of respondents who said they went to service, didn’t.

Many information collection methods are narrow in their understanding of the modern world. Certain question regarding religious services as church, automatically alienates any respondent belonging to a religion who attends any other religious service like synagogue, temple, ect. Either way religious service attendance is any way you look at the information gathered decreasing or in the least stagnant in the United States today. Again go back to the first week of class we heard from several students how their parent’s religiosity impacted their own throughout their childhood and their practices and commitments today. Comparatively to national data the information presented to us that day was hardly different from that of which we have read this weekend, non-religious parents turn out on average less religious children and vice versa with variables and special circumstances to be considered of course. I’d like to explore further what exactly compels people to falsely state that they have attended a religious service regularly or just in a single week in order to defend their religiosity. How exactly has this been reflected in our own class discussion regarding religion? In what other ways do people defend their religiosity unconsciously and daily?

As we all know the United States was founded on religious freedom. The religious landscape of the United States has been shaped by this idea throughout the centuries, taking many different forms and leaving us today with the rising and falling tides of religious affiliation. Most interesting is the ever-increasing percent of the population of the United States accepting religion yet denying affiliation with a recognized church or structured religious association.

Reading an overview of today’s religious landscape show that the United States, as it has been historically, is made up of a majority Protestant population with a falling 70.6 % followed by a rising 22.8% unaffiliated. Many would argue that religious freedom meant, and may still mean, the freedom to practice any protestant religion. As seen in the religious makeup of the representatives in national government the unaffiliated population in the United States is under represented, according to one set of data based on people verbally associating themselves with a religious organization. This is problematic because due to developing correlations between political parties and certain religious groups people with differing political views from those associated with their religious groups affiliation may prefer to respond “none” to a pollster as a way of distancing themselves from connected political views, but in practice still follow any given religion. Overall this phenomenon is increasing the difficulty to quantify the religious landscape in the United States. So person to person what does “religiously unaffiliated” mean. Unaffiliated with religion all together or the developing political context of religion.