Religion Unbundled: Toward a Twenty-first Century Paradigm for the Sociology of American Religion

Much recent sociological work on American religion is written outside the field’s twoestablished paradigms: secularization theory and the 1990s “religious economies” paradigm.Drawing together strands of recent theoretical innovation and a review of contemporary religiousdevelopments that challenge the existing paradigms, we introduce elements of a 21st centuryparadigm for the sociology of American religion. Our two orienting claims are that Americanreligion has become “unbundled” and that the boundaries of the religious field have becomeincreasingly porous. We demonstrate the value of our approach by showing how two majorreligious traditions, Christianity and Buddhism, have become unbundled. In both cases, ourapproach positions us to apprehend a range of phenomena, including à la carte unbundledelements that do religion-like work; alternative quasi-religious, secular and contested bundlesthat compete for attention and devotion with traditional religion; and traditional religious bundlesthat adapt to fit this new de facto unbundled landscape. Lastly, we assess the implications of ourapproach for scholars of religion, for sociology as a field, and for American society writ large.