Producing the Sacred

What is Public religion? How does it manifest the sacred? These are the fundamental questions Robert Wuthnow addresses in Producing the Sacred.
Wuthnow uses as a guiding assumption the idea that cultural expressions, religious or otherwise, do not simply happen but are produced. He considers the major kinds of organizations that produce public religion--congregations, hierarchies, special interests, academies, and public rituals--showing how these organizational vehicles shape public religion's messages and how specific types of religious organization draw resources from their environments. He also reveals the implicit and unintended ways in which sacredness is expressed in modern society.

A volume in the series Public Expressions of Religion in America