The relationship between religious meaning and modem culture has been an important scholarly topic since Max Weber first wrote of the disenchantment of the world. Conventionally, scholars who have addressed this relationship have assumed that religion must take a reactive role to modernization; their work implies that religion can only either affirm modernity or react against it. Contemporary social theorists, by contrast, address modernity as an unfinished project whose character depends on people's actions. Taking this theory as a point of departure, my dissertation investigates religion's potential to creatively improve upon modern culture, rather than simply to react to it. Drawing on two years of participant observation, the project identifies a specific language used by people in a wide variety of settings in order to relate to religious meaning. I argue that this language, which I call the language of reflexive spirituality, acts as a cultural resource that Americans are using to reground modern society in a sense of shared transcendent meaning. In the course of making this argument, I offer a reconceptualization of religion that highlights its cultural, communicative dimension. This reconceptualization of religion enables scholars to recognize religion's cultural power in the modernized context of American society.