Selective Deprivatization among American Religious Traditions: The Reversal of the Great Reversal

From the advent of this country, religious traditions and movements have displayed remarkable patterns of both withdrawal from and engagement with American public life. We highlight this history, present a theory about selective deprivatization in the past and present, and test for the current presence of religious privatization and deprivatization in the lives of Americans. Our results conclude that a significant minority of Americans resist individual-level privatization. They want religion to speak to social and political issues, and act accordingly. Among religious traditions, conservative movements such as evangelical Protestantism are the most publicly oriented, constituting a reversal of past generations. Liberal Protestants, once the most powerful religious voice in public arenas, are now much more privatized than conservative traditions.