Journal of the American Academy of Religion LXIV/4 AAR Religion and American Popular Culture: An Introductory Essay

J-/ECIDING WHAT IS popular seems easy enough. It is what everybody (mostly) likes or has heard about, what people are currently doing, wear-ing, eating, feeling. Our word popular derives from a Latin word, populus, which means "the people " So what is popular is what is "of the people", it is what is, as the dictionary says in one meaning, "frequently encoun-tered or widely accepted " (Webster) Finding the popular in a scholarly context, however, is not so easy To evoke an "American popular culture" seems to imply an opposite—an American unpopular culture7—against which the popular can be sited and measured And to suggest that reli-gion is somehow implicated in the production of the popular is to nod toward that other thorny growth among academic problems regarding it—the meaning of popular religion Charles H Long is helpful here m situating the cultural discourse out of which notions of popular religion initially arose in the West. They came, he tells us, out of Enlightenment conversations that throve on the "discov-ery " of difference—between European "civilization " and other "primitive" societies, and then, within European national borders, between educated elites and the "peasants " or the "folk. " So, as the work of Long suggests, there was in the philosophical celebration of the popular something of