Restructuring Revisited
Robert Wuthnow
September 9, 2025
The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II (Princeton University Press, 1988), is the book I want to revisit here. I tried to address three questions in that book: how did the conflict between religious liberals and religious conservatives emerge, what were its sources, and what did it imply?
At the time I was writing that book in the mid 1980s, the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s were still in the lived experience of most Americans, Ronald Reagan was president, Roe v. Wade was in place, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority was recent enough that it was not yet widely discussed, and the divisions within American Christianity could still be mapped as historic differences among denominations and between Protestants and Catholics. The emerging conflicts focused on gender, abortion, and homosexuality. The conflicts were associated with educational and regional differences, and they influenced political orientations. In polls, there was relative parity between liberals and conservatives. The book’s most receptive audience was among mainstream Protestant leaders interested in the changes happening in their denominations.
If we ask the question about conflict between religious liberals and conservatives today, we of course confront some of the same issues, especially abortion and homosexuality. But we must view the conflict in a world dramatically different from the 1980s. What should we take account of now?
In the 1980s there were debates about which political party had the best views of taxes, welfare spending, the federal deficit, foreign policy, and family values. But there wasn’t the sense that there is now about democracy itself being under siege. In the present context, we need to be singularly attentive to the threat of authoritarianism.
The religious right’s complicity has usefully been examined in studies of Christian nationalism. More is needed to make sense of the religious right’s role in recent US Supreme Court rulings, Project 2025, unitary executive ideology, anti-DEI executive orders, attacks on science and higher education, voucher and charter school legislation, nativism, voter intimidation, and deportations devoid of due process.
But it is especially the religious left that needs to be better understood. How is it organized? What are its strengths? What roles can it play in resisting the Trump administration’s attacks on American democracy?
From the reading I’ve been doing, I think the religious left is capable of resisting the current threats of authoritarianism in three crucially important ways: advocacy, communal support, and spiritual discipline.
Advocacy is speaking truth to power. In recent years, progressive faith groups have advocated for racial justice, economic justice, environmental justice, and reproductive rights. Progressive faith groups have also advocated for international debt relief, peace, gun safety reform, and equity in education. The advocacy depends less on widespread support in the pews and more on strategic organizing in activist hubs and special interest coalitions. It ranges from the street protests that followed the murder of George Floyd and the organizing that achieved passage of reproductive rights legislation in Ohio in 2023 to Pope Francis’s environmental encyclical Laudato Sí and Bishop Mariann Budde’s call for mercy toward the marginalized during the Inaugural Worship Service at the National Cathedral in January 2025.
Communal support happens for religious practitioners most effectively in local congregations. It functions as resistance when it provides a safe space, a refuge where participants who are marginalized can be protected and where others can find support for the values they hold dear. Community of this kind is evident in the congregations that have provided sanctuary for undocumented immigrants and in the faith-based community organizing that has engaged congregations in reflection about racial and economic justice. It ranges from the whole worker organizing that mobilized workers to unionize Smithfield Foods in 2008 to the many progressive congregations that have declared themselves welcoming across gender identities and sexual orientations. Community instantiated as a refuge from threatening political developments does not happen only in progressive congregations. It happens in seminaries, on college campuses, and among moderate evangelical groups as well.
Spiritual discipline is of particular interest given the growing share of the population that identifies as spiritual but not religious. Spiritual discipline is often the private, intensely personal practice that functions as a kind of resistance to the chaotic politicized, commercialized world in which we live. For many, spiritual discipline provides order, routine, and a sense of agency that counteracts the competitive striving inherent in secular life. For others, spiritual discipline is a way of letting go, finding joy in the conviction that creative playfulness is ingrained in the universe itself. Above all, spiritual discipline is an intentional practice that induces reflection about the transcendent realities in which moral claims are grounded and from which hope is found. In the best instances, it is an inward focus that extends outward to acts of service and commitments to civic responsibility.
Scholarly investigations that examine these kinds of resistance should do more than merely document interesting aspects of American religion. Good investigations can also contribute to a better understanding of how these kinds of resistance can work against the rising tide of authoritarianism.
The tools available for scholarly research on these topics are far better than they were in the 1980s. Ethnographic methods have improved. Archival information is more readily available. Credible quantitative research is being done, despite rising costs and other challenges. More use is being made of field experiments. Social media is contributing opportunities to study networks and communication. Web-scraping studies and digital humanities projects have proliferated.
The theoretical tools have also advanced. Restructuring was written against prevailing theoretical frameworks in which discussions of modernity and secularization dominated. Today, there is much greater emphasis on power, conflict, and diversity. Religion is more often studied as practice. The sacred and the secular are more complexly intertwined.
In these fraught times, when questions about religion’s future and its relation to power loom so large, we clearly must use the best scholarly tools we can muster.