Menu:
Research
My main research interests center around culture and religion in the United States, especially everyday religion, ways people use the category "religion," and the interaction between religions and the state. Broadly my work is relevant to the sociology of culture, social theory, political sociology, the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of religion.
One way that I have explored these topics is through an examination of U.S. State Department reports on international religious freedom. These public documents offer an example of how the category of religion is shaped through discursive practices within the context of a government bureaucracy. My findings have been published as a chapter in an edited volume:
Moore, Rick. 2011. The Genres of Religious Freedom: Creating Discourses on Religion at the State Department. Pp. 223-53 in History, Time, Meaning, and Memory: Ideas for the Sociology of Religion. Barbara Denison and John Simpson, eds. Leiden and Boston: Brill
An abstract of the paper can be found below.
I am currently working on a dissertation proposal that will further explore everyday uses of the category of religion and their implications for our understanding of the role of culture in daily life. Separate from my dissertation research I am conducting an historical inquiry into an understudied form of religious organization found in the early twentieth century.
Generally, my research draws on qualitative methods including in-depth interviews, ethnographic study, and a close analysis of historical sources.
In the past I have conducted in-person interviews of religious leaders for a national survey being carried out by the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame.
Abstract
“The Genres of Religious Freedom:
Creating Discourses on Religion at the State Department”
Each year the U.S. Department of State writes a report on the status of religious freedom in every country in the world. These reports draw upon a set of pre-existing genres that structure how international religious freedom is talked about in the United States, namely universal human rights and idealized religious pluralism. The genre of universal human rights portrays religious freedom as something universal while the genre of idealized religious pluralism talks about religious freedom as a uniquely American phenomena. Both genres draw subtle boundaries around particular notions of what religion is and its appropriate role in society. The use of these two speech genres thus helps explain the tendencies described by critics for the reports to favor some religious groups over others. An analysis of how these genres are deployed within the reports also illustrates one way that the concept of religious freedom, and by extension religion itself, is constructed in practice.