Authority and Trust in Culture, Literature and Religion

In American culture, literature, and religion, authority and trust relationships radically changed towards the end of the colonial period with the modernization processes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the field of cultural production, relevant structural shifts concern the nineteenth-century emergence of mass reading, professionalization of authorship and industrialization of the book market, and the twentieth-century pluralization of cultural forms, education and media revolutions, and the rise of social movements. In the field of religion, the nineteenth century brought a radical transformation of religious institutions, denominational pluralization, and a reorganization and diversification of religious practice (including broad-based lay participation) in the wake of disestablishment as well as the rise of new evangelical movements. In the twentieth century, the democratization of religion was compounded by the rise of individualized “seeker religion” that often seems at odds with traditional forms of clericalism, Christian morality, and confessional authority.

Modernization theory has tended to misconstrue the decline of particular sources of authority and trust as a general decline: in religion, a decline of “churchliness” and an erosion of the sacred or gradual disappearance of religious sensibilities (“secularization”); in literature and culture, a breakdown of value hierarchies that could be celebrated as an achievement of freewheeling democratic “countercultures” or critiqued as a symptom of an expanding “culture industry”. As recent approaches suggest, however, the weakening of traditional formations must be considered in the context of new sources of religious and cultural authority and trust.