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Nearly two-thirds of Americans say that religion is important to them. Despite （or perhaps in response to） the seemingly endless stream of films produced in this country that depict sex and violence, there has been an increase in religiosity among Americans. Fundamentalist forms of Christianity （those that take the New Testament more or less literally） are on the rise. The United States, for all of their emphasis on freedom of religion, is at first glance remarkably homogeneous.

Nearly 90 percent of Americans are connected to some form of Christianity. Judaism and Islam, each with about 2 percent of the population, are the next largest in membership, and Islam is the fastest growing religion in the United States. Of course, these numbers mask an incredible variety within those categories. In addition, in large and even medium-sized cities, it is possible to find places of worship for most of the world’s major faiths including Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. This reflects again the variety of people from all over the world who now make their homes in the United States. However, in smaller towns or rural areas, you will in all probability find only Christian churches （including Catholic and several Protestant denominations） and perhaps a Jewish synagogue. The dominance that Judeo-Christian values hold on people’s public discourse should come as no surprise.

Like many aspects of American culture, Americans’ feelings about public displays of religion are in conflict. In November 2003, a judge in Alabama was removed from office for refusing to move a prominent display of the Ten Commandments, and that event showed Americans were largely split on the issue. A recent survey showed that while 70 percent of them prefer a president with strong religious beliefs, 50 percent are uncomfortable when politicians discuss how religious they are. ThePledge of Allegiance⁴（to the American flag） is commonly recited at the beginning of public events. The words “under God” were added in the 1950s during the Cold War, and there has been an ever-growing controversy over whether it violates the cherished notion of the separation of religion and government. The Cold War also saw the introduction of “In God We Trust” as the national motto and its addition to the U.S. paper currency （although it was previously found on many coins）. Secularism is also prominent in American public life, and in general atheists and agnostics are accepted at work or school without difficulty.

Because the American population is so mobile, they often find themselves free to reinventthemselves in their new location. Thus, they are culturally free to convert to different religions almost at will. It is not unusual for Muslims or Buddhists to be from Christian families. Interfaith marriages do not often result in the conversion of one spouse to the other’s faith, but instead the couple might seek out a different faith altogether. Unitarian churches, for example, often have among their members Jews who have married Christians. Americans are even free to invent their own versions of faith, with many interfaith congregations representing a conglomeration of Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity.

A hundred years ago, the various Protestant denominations were quite distinct from one another, and people rarely intermarried. After World War II, when college and university enrollment dramatically increased, the number of intermarriages rose sharply. Today it is difficult even for many Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Lutherans⁵to describe the differences among themselves. Catholicism （and the various branches of Eastern Orthodox Christianity） has remained largely distinct from Protestantism, but that distinction is now gradually becoming blurred as more interfaith marriages occur.

The variety of religious beliefs in the United States surpasses the nation’s multitude of ethnicities, nationalities, and races, making religion another source of diversity rather than a unifying force. This is true even though the vast majority of Americans—83 percent—identify themselves as Christian. One-third of these self-identified Christians are unaffiliated with any church. Moreover, practicing Christians belong to a wide variety of churches that differ on theology, organization, programs, and policies.

The largest number of Christians in the United States belong to one of the many Protestant denominations—groups that vary widely in their beliefs and practices. Roman Catholics constitute the next largest group of American Christians, followed by the Eastern Orthodox. Most Christians in America are Protestant, but hundreds of Protestant denominations and independent congregations exist. Many of the major denominations, such as Baptists, Lutherans, and Methodists, are splintered into separate groups that have different ideas about theology or church organization. Some Protestant religious movements, including Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism⁶, cut across many different Protestant organizations.

Roman Catholics, the next largest religious group in the United States, are far more unified than Protestants. This is due in part to Roman Catholicism’s hierarchical structure and willingness to allow a degree of debate within its ranks, even while insisting on certain corebeliefs. The Eastern Orthodox Church, the third major group of Christian churches, is divided by national origin, with the Greek Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church being the largest of the branches in the United States.

Among many Protestant denominations, blacks and whites generally maintain distinct organizations and practices, or at least separate congregations. Even among Roman Catholics the residential segregation in American society produces separate parishes and parish schools.

Judaism is the next largest religion in the United States, with about 2 percent of the population in 2001. It is also divided into branches, with the largest being Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative. Other religions practiced in America include Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. Islam is among the fastest-growing religious groups; its members were just about 1 percent of the U.S. population in 2001.

Large numbers of Americans do not have a religious view of the world—some 8 percent are nonreligious, secular, or are atheists; that is, they do not believe in a god or gods. Adding these to the non-practicing Christian population means that slightly more than a quarter of the American population is unaffiliated with any church or denomination. This mixture of multiple religious and secular points of view existed from the beginning of European colonization.

Freedom of Religion refers to the right of a person to form personal religious beliefs according to his or her own conscience and to give public expression to these beliefs in worship and teaching, restricted only by the requirements of public order. Religious liberty differs from toleration in that toleration presupposes preferential treatment of a particular creed by the state because it is an established church or, in some cases, is the predominant religion of the population.

The United States was the first, and for some time the only, nation to include the principle of religious liberty in its basic laws. The nations of antiquity permitted tolerance to individuals of minority religions, provided they took part in the public worship of the national gods.

Soon after Christianity became established as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century, heresy and heterodoxy became equivalent to treason. After the Reformation⁷this condemnation of atypical religious beliefs was continued by nations with established reformed churches, and those who disagreed with the established church were punished.

The colonists immigrating to the New World brought with them the same doctrine of religious intolerance, and in many of the American colonies dissent from the established orderof worship was regarded as sedition. The charter of Rhode Island, granted in 1663, is notable for being the first to include a declaration of the right to religious liberty. This doctrine gradually spread to the other colonies, and at the time of the American Revolution the principle of religious liberty was explicitly adopted in various state constitutions. The process culminated in the adoption of the U.S. Constitution , which in Article VI forbids the establishment of any religious test as a qualification for federal office, and in the 1st Amendment forbids the passage of laws “respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”.

No aspect of life has elicited greater political involvement on the part of religious groups than sexuality in general, and homosexuality in particular. Religious groups became most active in antigay activities and rhetoric soon after the modern-day gay rights movement in the United States began in June 1969 in New York City, after a police raid on a gay bar, popularly referred to as the Stonewall riot⁸, from the name of the bar. Since then, a number of organizations have been formed to work for gay rights against growing antigay sentiment.

In religious circles, Christian conservatives have tirelessly opposed gay rights, as they have sought to strengthen men’s and women’s traditional roles in the home and the workplace. The Family Research Council, a nonprofit organization founded in 1977, produces internationally syndicated daily radio programs, opposes “same-sex marriage”, and seeks to maintain the traditional heterosexual understanding of marriage and family. Similar groups, such as Focus on the Family, a Washington-based nonprofit that promotes Judeo-Christian values, oppose equating homosexuality with civil rights. By the 1990s, such groups’ work proved successful when a string of gay rights measures were successfully repealed or amended in state constitutions. For example, in 1992 Colorado became the first state to nullify an existing civil rights protection for homosexuals by amending its constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court would later strike down the provision in 1996.

In terms of politics and public policymaking, groups like Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family face opposition from organizations including the Religious Leadership Roundtable, who argue that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender （GLBT） people face pervasive discrimination in the workplace, in housing, in public accommodations, and in other areas. The Religious Leadership Roundtable, a group of some 40 spiritual leaders, seeks to combat the antigay rhetoric of the Religious Right by promoting a more tolerant, faith-based message thataffirms GLBT equality on issues such as employment discrimination, adoption, partnership and marriage, and discrimination in the U.S. military. Additionally, organizations such at the Washington-based National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and Lambda Legal Defense Fund work to ensure the civil rights of their members through litigation and legislation. More specifically, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, a group that seeks to protect religious liberties, has filed lawsuits on behalf of gay men and lesbians fired on the basis of their sexual orientation.

Members of the GLBT community received support from the American Academy of Pediatrics （AAP） in February 2002 when the group endorsed the adoption of children by gays and lesbians. The AAP cited estimates suggesting that as many as 9 million American children have at least one gay parent when urging its 55 000 members to take an active role in supporting measures that allow homosexual adoption. The Traditional Values Coalition, a Christian lobbying group, dismissed the endorsement as a disservice to medicine.

By the year 2000, the United Church of Christ was the only mainline Protestant denomination to allow gay and lesbian marriage. Other Protestant denominations such as the Presbyterian Church USA, the Episcopal Church, and the United Methodist Church have considered, but voted not to recognize, unions between two people of the same sex. Under a same-sex union, or marriage, gay and lesbian couples would receive the same benefits, rights, and privileges as any heterosexual couple. As citizens and taxpayers, groups including the National Lesbian and Gay Law Association, established in 1988 as an affiliate of the American Bar Association, argue that gay and lesbian couples should share the same “common benefits”of marriage that the state provides automatically to married couples, such as health care coverage, family leave care, and social security benefits. By the mid-1990s, however, many states began explicitly banning same-sex marriages. By 1999, 30 states had done so. Nonetheless, some states, for instance California and Hawaii, do have statewide domestic partnership arrangements, and the Vermont Supreme Court in 2000 passed the most comprehensive legislation giving same-sex couples the same benefits as heterosexual couples.

Abortion, in contemporary parlance, refers to the intentional termination of pregnancy. Abortion became one of the most divisive issues of the last quarter of the 20th century and remains an important question in contemporary political discourse in the United States.

Throughout most of American history, abortion had been legal prior to “quickening”, orthe perception of fetal movement on the part of the woman. Most state legislatures did not pass laws proscribing the practice until the late 19th century.

The idea of liberalizing abortion laws became culturally salient during the late 1960s, and several state legislatures passed relatively permissive abortion laws during this period. The trend toward gradual liberalization was interrupted by the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 decision Roe v. Wade ⁹, which held virtually all state abortion laws to be unconstitutional. Although public opinion generally moved in a more pro-choice direction following Roe , the decision mobilized opposition from several, often religious, sources. Many cultural and religious conservatives opposed legal abortion because legal abortion was thought to encourage sexual promiscuity by reducing the risks of sexual activity outside of marriage. Another early source of opposition to legal abortion came from the African-American community. Several African-American leaders denounced legal abortion as “genocide” and suggested that easy access to abortion would ultimately be used by whites to limit societal responsibility to care for children born into poverty.

The most visible opposition to Roe came from Roman Catholic Church and Evangelical Protestant leaders, who regarded abortion as the taking of human life. Indeed, since the Roe decision, opponents of legal abortion have been characterized by themselves and opponents as“pro-life”. Catholics opposed legal abortion on the ground that intentional termination of pregnancy constituted a violation of natural law. Since the early 1950s, the fetus was regarded as “ensouled” （and, therefore, fully human） from the moment of conception. Evangelical Protestants came to oppose abortion on the basis of biblical passages in Exodus, Leviticus, and Proverbs.

Conversely, support for legal abortion has come primarily from people who regard a woman’s right to control her own fertility as fundamental. Abortion, to some activists, has come to be regarded as an issue of women’s rights, and proponents of legal abortion have generally been characterized as “pro-choice”.

At the activist level, the abortion issue has been regarded as one in which compromise is difficult or impossible, as suggested by constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe’s book on abortion politics entitled Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes （1989）. Because that both pro-life and pro-choice advocates cast their arguments in terms of （nonnegotiable） rights and that abortion politics in the United States has largely been conducted in the courts may have contributed to the apparent intractability of the issue. However, mass opinion on the abortion issue reflects a strong ambivalence, in that most Americans value both the potential life of thefetus and the privacy rights of women who may wish to terminate pregnancies. A plurality of Americans might be characterized as “situationalists”, in that they regard abortion as appropriate in some circumstances but not others. Interestingly, religiosity appears to increase the incidence of pro-life sentiment in virtually all religious denominations, despite the fact that many denominations take nuanced or explicitly pro-choice positions.

An intriguing aspect of abortion politics is the changing nature of pro-life rhetoric since the Roe decision. Initially following Roe , antiabortion arguments were generally couched in religious language, in which considerations of morality, natural law, or Scripture were paramount. Gradually, however, the focus of attention has shifted from religious to scientific arguments for opposition to legal abortion. Pro-life leaders are increasingly likely to argue that a fetus is a genetically unique entity that develops identifiable human characteristics very early in the gestation period. While much opposition to legal abortion still has religious sources, the arguments posed have become increasingly secularized, and correspondingly less likely to evoke concepts from a specific theological tradition.

In the period following Roe v. Wade , the Supreme Court generally struck down attempts by state governments to regulate the practice of abortion. This trend came to an end in the 1989 case of Webster v. Reproductive Health Services ¹⁰, which upheld several state restrictions on abortion. Webster was regarded by abortion activists on both sides of the issue as a victory for pro-life forces. But despite the willingness of the Supreme Court in the post- Webster era to uphold state regulations on access to abortion services, the Court has stopped short of overturning the precedent set in Roe . In Planned Parenthood v. Casey ¹¹, the Court explicitly upheld the core ruling in Roe while simultaneously upholding a number of regulations intended to make abortions more difficult to obtain.

One possible consequence of these changes in abortion jurisprudence is that, since the early 1990s, abortion has become a highly partisan issue. Among both party leaders and members of the mass public, the abortion issue has become more polarized along party lines, with the Democratic Party taking a generally consistent pro-choice position and the Republicans becoming more uniformly pro-life. Abortion has become a very important issue in many elections in the United States.

In response to the continued legality of abortion, many pro-life activists have resorted to“direct action”, which has included sidewalk counseling near abortion clinics, obstructing access to such facilities, vandalism of abortion clinics, and occasional violence against abortion providers. Many of these activists are motivated by religious zeal, although theiractions are generally condemned by most religious leaders.

Abortion activists on both sides of the issue have been challenged by a number of developments in the evolution of the issue. Contemporary abortion debate now centers around the morality and legality of so-called partial birth abortions, which are late-term abortions performed for medical reasons. Other controversies surround the use of the drug RU-486, which provides an alternative to surgical abortions in the early stages of pregnancy, and the appropriateness of research on fetal tissue. Fetal tissue research has appeared to be a promising avenue of inquiry for curing such maladies as Alzheimer’s disease and juvenile diabetes, but the morality of such research has been challenged by pro-life advocates.

Religion is not an isolated activity in American life but engaged with popular culture at every level—in work and in play, in regular rituals and in social relations. Although religion is a separate and distinct social institution dealing with the supernatural and anchored in the church, synagogue, mosque, or temple, it has assumed complex and ambivalent relations with the popular media as well as with other aspects of the culture industry. Religious themes are consistently represented in media such as radio, recordings, television, film, and the Internet, technologies that in turn have been adopted by religious groups. In this exchange, tensions often arise between religious interests and the popular cultural formations of the larger society. For example, on June 18, 1996, the Southern Baptist Convention （SBC） passed a resolution to boycott the Walt Disney Company. Arguing that the company had abandoned its former commitment to providing healthy family entertainment, the SBC accused Disney of promoting immorality, homosexuality, and adultery. In launching a crusade against Disney, the Southern Baptist Convention argued that the company was a cultural force working against conservative Christian beliefs, values, and sexual ethics. In addition, the SBC suggested that Disney was actually promoting an alternative religion in animated features such as The Lion King （1994） and Pocahontas （1995）, films that, in the view of the SBC, constituted a threat to Christianity.

So far, three basic relationships have been established between religion and popular culture: religion appears in popular culture; popular culture is integrated into religion; and religion is sometimes in conflict with the production and consumption of popular culture.

First, representations of religion and religions are expressed in the productions of popular culture. During the twentieth century, the explosion of electronic media expanded the scope of religious representations through radio, film, television, and the Internet. On December 24,1906, the first wireless radio broadcast in the United States consisted of a religious program of devotional music and Bible reading. Although electronic media have certainly been exploited by religious groups for their own interests, the culture industry has also been actively involved in representing religious themes. In American popular culture, the secular and commercial productions of Hollywood films have played a powerful role in shaping public perceptions of religion and religions. On the one hand, representations of religion can be explicit. Popular films depict recognizable religious characters—priests and nuns, evangelists and rabbis, gurus and lamas—in their narratives. They draw story lines from religious traditions, especially from the Bible, in producing popular films. On the other hand, according to many cultural analysts, representations of religion in film are often implicit. Basic religious motifs of sin, sacrifice, and redemption, for example, can structure the plots of ostensibly secular films.

Second, the practices of conventional religions incorporate aspects of popular culture. Successful religious groups generally adopt the material culture, the visual media, the musical styles, and other features of popular culture. In American culture, the prominence of religious broadcasting on television has demonstrated the success of Christian evangelicals in appropriating an advanced communications technology in the service of the “great mandate”to preach their gospel to all nations. More recently, religious groups have established their presence on the Internet, exploring the potential of cyberspace for religious mobilization. Drawn into the service of transmitting religion, the media of popular culture present both new possibilities and new limits for the practice of religion. In the entire range of electronic media, the transmission of religion is exclusively visual and auditory, offering new forms of visual piety and new styles of preaching, praying, and singing. But the religion of electronic media is devoid of all the smells, tastes, and physical contacts that feature in conventional religious ritual and religious life. While converting popular culture to religious purposes, religious groups are also converted by the pervasive culture of consumerism in American society. As a prominent if not defining feature of American popular culture, consumerism has resulted in“selling God”, transforming religious holy days into “consumer rites”, and even fostering“religio-economic corporations”, such as Amway, Herbalife, and Mary Kay Cosmetics, that merge business, family, and a Christian gospel of prosperity into a “charismatic capitalism” .

Third, tensions often develop between religious groups and the productions of popular culture. Frequently, conservative Christians complain about the moral relativism and spiritual corruption of American popular culture in general. With particular intensity, they single out rock ‘n’ roll, rap, and other forms of popular recorded music as being dangerously immoral,antisocial, and antireligious. Like the Baptist boycott of the Walt Disney Company, religious campaigns to censor, label, or influence popular music are periodically waged by conservative Christian activists and organizations. Going beyond the music and lyrics, these critics attack the imagery, values, and lifestyles associated with these popular art forms. In this cultural conflict over popular music, evangelical Christians have created a successful commercial industry in Christian rock music—or contemporary Christian music—that is unified less by musical style, rhythm, or performance than by the explicitly religious content of the lyrics. As a result of conflict between a particular religious grouping and the productions of popular culture, therefore, alternative cultural movements can emerge and even establish a place within the culture industry.

As conventional religious groups interact with popular culture in these ways—by being represented in its media, by adopting its techniques, or by rejecting its productions—the dividing line between religion and popular culture blurs. While popular media are telling religious stories and religious groups are appropriating popular media, culture wars engage intense religious interests. The very term “religion” becomes part of the contested terrain of popular culture. Although representatives of conventional religious groups tend to reserve the term for themselves, relegating popular culture to the realm of the secular, they will occasionally designate the production or consumption of popular culture as “religion” in order to intensify the cultural contest. As noted, the Southern Baptist Convention boycotted Disney not only because it was a secular alternative to religion but also because the corporation was allegedly advancing an alternative religion in competition with Christianity. Likewise, religious critics occasionally attack rock music for promoting the alternative religions of Satanism or pantheism¹². In these exchanges, it is hard to tell where religion leaves off and popular culture begins. Participants in popular culture often report that religious interests are at stake.

Churches play a vital role in American society. They are woven into the fabric of service organizations that tend to special social needs. Frequently referred to as faith-based communities, perhaps in an attempt to discharge the use of more obvious religious language that would openly test the church-state relationship, churches are very much involved in medical care through hospitals, education from the youngest age through graduate school, and the promotion of social justice through charitable activities.

Catholic Charities, for example, traces its beginnings to New Orleans in 1727, when an order of nuns opened an orphanage. Today, it serves over 7 million people with annual resources of nearly $3 billion, 60 percent of which is derived from government. Catholic Charities employs around 50 000 staff members and coordinates the work of nearly 200 000 volunteers through 137 agencies and their 1 341 branches and affiliates. More than 4.5 million people benefit from its food service operations, which include food banks, soup kitchens, and home-delivered meals. More than 3 million people, including many at-risk persons, receive social support and neighborhood services as well as health-related and educational enrichment services. Thousands more receive services designed to strengthen families, including counseling, mental health, addiction, refugee, pregnancy, and adoption services. Catholic Charities also provides housing services, from temporary shelters and supervised living to permanent housing, and basic needs services to the poorest of the poor such as assistance with clothing, utility bills, finances, and medication.

One of President George W. Bush’s first acts as president was to sign Executive Order no. 13199, which established the White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives¹³. The office was created to identify and eliminate any barriers that might impede faith-based and community organizations （FBCOs） from participating in federal grants and to pursue legislation to prevent discrimination against FBCOs by extending charitable choice provisions, to protect the religious freedom of the FBCOs, and to maintain the religious hiring rights of the FBCOs. President Bush was named America’s most influential Christian in a list of 50 owing in great part to setting up this office in 2001.

1. Alexis de Tocqueville亚历西斯·德·托克维尔（1805—1859），是法国的政治思想家和历史学家。他最知名的著作是《论美国的民主》（ Democracy in America ）。

2. Vince Lombardi文斯•伦巴第（1913—1970），传奇式的橄榄球教练，带领绿湾包装工队（the Green Bay Packers）多次获胜，超级碗杯（the Superbowl Trophy）就是以他的名字命名的。

3. 1994年挪威利勒哈默尔冬奥会美国国内选拔赛上，两届全美花样滑冰冠军托尼娅·哈丁碰上“冰上女王”南希·克里根。1994年1月6日选拔赛前夕，哈丁唆使其丈夫雇凶，在更衣室过道里用棒球棒袭击了南希，导致后者膝部受伤。

4. ThePledge of Allegiance美国效忠誓词，是1892年由一位浸礼会牧师弗郎西斯·贝拉米（Francis Bellamy）撰写的。现在的效忠誓词全文为：“我宣誓效忠美利坚合众国国旗，以及它所象征的共和国：在上帝庇佑下的统一国家，不可分割，人人享有自由与正义。（I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.）”。

5. Baptist是“浸礼教徒”，Methodist是“卫理公会派教徒”，Presbyterian是“长老会教友”，Congregationalist是“公理会之教友”，Lutheran是“路德会教友”。

6. Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism基督教基要派（Fundamentalism），亦有译作原教旨基督教，是基督教中从19世纪末开始的一个思潮，反对自由主义神学，主张圣经绝对无误，以字面的、传统的方式理解圣经，接受传统的基督教教义。与福音派基本上是一个意思，但比一般福音派更严格地按字面理解圣经的神学派别。福音派（Evangelicalism）是恪守传统教义，重视《圣经》权威和学术研究，而不予人视为固执无知。福音派喜欢定位为“强调教义的宗派”，比基要派更愿听取融合不同方面的观点。

7. the Reformation宗教改革，是指基督宗教在16世纪至17世纪进行的一次改革，是资产阶级披着宗教外衣的一场资产阶级性质的改革，改革代表人物马丁路德、加尔文及茨温利等人，以及发展出来的新教教派。

8. Stonewall riot石墙暴动，是1969年6月28日凌晨发生于邻近纽约市格林尼治村中的石墙酒吧，一连串因警方临检而爆发的自发性暴力示威冲突。石墙暴动常被认定是美国史上同性恋者反抗政府主导的、迫害同性恋制度的开端。

9. Roe v. Wade 罗诉韦德案，是美国联邦最高法院对于妇女堕胎权以及隐私权的重要案例，对于妇女堕胎的问题，美国联邦最高法院承认妇女的“堕胎权”受到宪法隐私权的保护。

10. Webster v. Reproductive Health Services 韦伯斯特诉生育健康服务中心案（1989年），在这一案中美国最高法院推翻了在“罗伊诉韦德案”中确立的关于堕胎的法律规范，即所谓的“胎儿存活性三阶段的划分”。美国最高法院认为：“罗伊判例关于胎儿存活性三阶段的划分是一个应当纠正的错误。”

11. Planned Parenthood v. Casey 计划生育诊所诉凯茜案（1992年），在这一案中联邦最高法院解释了对堕胎的自由选择为什么是基本权利，维护了罗诉韦德案的判决，但是又对其做出了部分修正。

12. 魔鬼崇拜（satanism），泛指自称自己是基督教魔鬼撒旦的崇拜者的人，他们有意的反对基督教，将基督教的信仰和仪式都颠倒过来。泛神论（pantheism），是一种将自然界与神等同起来，以强调自然界的至高无上的哲学观点。认为神就存在于自然界一切事物之中，并没有另外的超自然的主宰或精神力量。

13. White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives白宫信仰和社团倡议办公室

I. Fill in the blanks according to the text.

1. Americans are distinctive in the degree to which they believe in the ideal, as stated in their________________, that “all men are created equal.”

2. Nearly 90 percent of Americans are connected to some form of ________________.________________ and Islam, each with about 2 percent of the population, are the next largest in membership.

3. In the U.S. Constitution , ________________ forbids the establishment of any religious test as a qualification for federal office, and ________________ forbids the passage of laws“respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”.

4. By the year 2000, ________________ was the only mainline Protestant denomination to allow gay and lesbian marriage.

5. In 1973, the Supreme Court’s landmark decision ________________ held virtually all state abortion laws to be unconstitutional.

6. On June 18, 1996, ________________ passed a resolution to boycott the Walt Disney Company, accusing Disney of promoting immorality, homosexuality, and adultery.