American Piety: The Nature of Religious Commitment

by Rodney Stark, Charles Y. Glock

How religious are Americans these days? How many still believe in God, in Biblical miracles, in heaven and hell? Do people pray? How much money is being given to churches, by Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and other groups? American Piety, the first of a three-volume study of religious commitment, answers these and a host of other questions about the contemporary religious scene. Particularly startling are the contrasts in beliefs, practices, and experiences revealed among the eleven major Christian denominations whose membership is compared.

246 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 1968

About the author

Rodney Stark grew up in Jamestown, North Dakota, and began his career as a newspaper reporter. Following a tour of duty in the U.S. Army, he received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, where he held appointments as a research sociologist at the Survey Research Center and at the Center for the Study of Law and Society. He left Berkeley to become Professor of Sociology and of Comparative Religion at the University of Washington. In 2004 he joined the faculty of Baylor University. He published 30 books and more than 140 scholarly articles on subjects as diverse as prejudice, crime, suicide, and city life in ancient Rome. However, the greater part of his work has been on religion. He was former president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. He also won a number of national and international awards for distinguished scholarship. Many of his books and articles have been translated and published in foreign languages, including Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Slovene, and Turkish.

Reviews

[Don Barger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. The statistics are old (from the 1960’s) but it is interesting that some of the same challenges in the 60’s continue to exist today.

[Jw · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although lots of new studies on religious commitment have been published I loved the five dimensions, particularly the experience dimension and the defenition of religious experience was very good.