Steven M. Tipton

Steven Michael Tipton teaches sociology of religion, morality, and culture at Emory University and its Candler School of Theology, where he is Charles Howard Candler Professor and former Director of the Graduate Division of Religion. A native of San Francisco, he studied literature, philosophy, and religion at Stanford University, then coupled cultural sociology with comparative philosophical and religious ethics for a joint PhD in Sociology and the Study of Religion at Harvard University. This led to Getting Saved from the Sixties: Moral Meaning in Conversion and Cultural Change, which explored conversion as a change of heart, mind, and way of life among countercultural youth from working-class backgrounds born again in spirit-filled Pentecostal churches, middle-class hipsters in the human potential movement buckling down to bureaucratic work, and educated elites seeking enlightenment through the meditative orthopraxy of Zen monastic communities. From this research emerged a kind of moral anthropology, built around interpretive sociology and descriptive ethics, to show how particular persons situated in social space and historical time make moral sense of their lives and their world, and how they do it within communities of shared discourse and practice. This offered a model for Tipton’s collaborative work with Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan and Ann Swidler on Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (1986 Pulitzer Prize jury finalist), a social inquiry into middle-class American mores and culture in love, work and politics; and The Good Society, a cultural inquiry into the moral drama of American institutions. These works in turn informed Tipton’s subsequent research, including Public Pulpits: Methodists and Mainline Churches in the Moral Argument of Public Life (2008), which maps the growing moral advocacy and mobilizing efforts of the mainline churches in Washington since 1980, amid mushrooming parachurch religious lobbies and paraparty political-action groups. It charts their shifting modes of discourse and practice through the altered institutional landscape of a more densely crowded, formally organized, fiercely contested, and nationally integrated Public Square that blurs bright lines of church-state separation. Steve Tipton is currently at work on a moral and social inquiry into The Life to Come: Re-Creating Retirement. A native of San Francisco, he played semi-pro baseball in California and worked as a murder investigator in New York City.