Additional information
by Richard Stivers (Author), J. M. Van Der Laan (Author)
Religion in American Today describes how sacred powers and secular religions have overtaken and infiltrated Christianity. Secular religion is now dominant in America: It assumes the forms of personal religion and political religion. Christianity makes its living within the confines of these secular religions. The point of the book is to identify the idolatry in what now passes for Christianity. Technology and the political state are socially constructed as sacred powers. As such they are idols. In its slumber Christianity embraces technology and the political state to the point of becoming subordinate to them. Concurrently technology and the political state give rise to the dominant secular religions. Personal religion acts as a consumer service, a psychological technique, to acquire health and happiness in this life. Political religion is a consequence of politics replacing religion in the quest for collective meaning in a technological society. Political movements become religious revivals and political parties, churches. This book is an attempt to awaken Christians to the idols that beckon.
Author Biography
Richard Stivers is Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Illinois State University. He is the author of Hair of the Dog: Irish Drinking and Its American Stereotype; Evil in Modern Myth and Ritual; The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline; Technology As Magic; The Illusion of Freedom and Equality; and The Media Creates Us in Its Image and Other Essays on Technology and Culture. He gave three lectures based on three of his books to the European Commission in 2006.
J. M. van der Laan is Professor Emeritus of the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Illinois State University. His expertise extends from German literature, in particular Faust, to the role of technology in contemporary life. His various publications address a wide range of topics such as printing in the first hundred years after Gutenberg, eighteenth-century essays, nineteenth-century science fiction, and technology in culture, literature, and society.
