UFM American Religious Landscape Question
For your second research assignment, please choose a recent addition to the American
religious landscape. This group may be a cult, sect, or recent denomination, and you
should designate whether it is a “natural” or “voluntary” community of believers. Some
of the groups immigrated here; others were home-grown, emerging here in America.
Does your group emerge from one of the major world religions? Did it have a charismatic
founder? How does it relate to the rest of American society? What rituals, beliefs,
scriptures, practices, etc. set this group apart from traditional American denominations?
How was your group treated by mainstream society? And does your group have any
staying power into the future?
To avoid writing the encyclopedia or Wikipedia article on your topic, please focus your
essay around a particular insight or interpretation (your argument and thesis). You will
need to summarize the group’s origin and background, but you will need a particular
insight or angle to analyze. Essays should offer interpretation and analysis rather than
just repeating the information from sources.
Since this is a SOURCE DEPENDENT essay, please keep track of your sources.
Your essay should have 2-3 print media sources (which can include our textbooks) and
2-3 online sources (which can include Youtube.com films). You will need to DOCUMENT
YOUR USE OF SOURCES WITHIN YOUR TEXT WITH CITATIONS and to CREATE A
IBLIOGRAPHY / WORKS CITED. An APA or MLA handbook can help you with
documentation. The Writing Center also has resources. Essays without CITATIONS
will be returned for further work.
The purpose of this assignment is to give you practice researching an emergent religion
so that you can put into practice the terms and interpretative tools we have learned this
semester. Our text WORLD RELIGIONS IN AMERICA presents materials on all of the
groups listed below. Our questions on how to analyze an unfamiliar group come from
Livingston.
