Wanted: A New Chronology of American Religious History
When my colleague Catherine Brekus and I edited American Christianities: A History of Dominance and Diversity, published this month by the University of North Carolina Press, we organized chapters from our twenty-two authors thematically. Sections included “Christian Diversity in America,” “Practicing Christianity in America,” and “Christianity and the American Nation.” Looking back over the past dozen years, edited volumes have most frequently taken this thematic approach. New Directions in American Religious History (Oxford, 1997), edited by Harry S. Stout and D. G. Hart, included sections on “American Religion and Society” and “Protestantism and Region.” Similarly, when Peter W. Williams edited Perspectives on American Religion and Culture (Blackwell, 1999), sections addressed such topics as “Race and Ethnicity” and “Intellectual and Literary Culture.”
Books with multiple authors addressing the range of American religious experiences perform an invaluable service both for scholars and students, and broad thematic topics are the most efficient way to give needed coherence to diverse perspectives and materials. But the thematic strategy elides one crucial task of historical inquiry: proposing models of development across time. In a word, what would contemporary historians claim about the chronology of American religious history, its major periods and nodes of transformation? And how would historians of American Christianity position various Christian groups within that larger narrative of religions?
In no small measure, decisions about periodization depend on the issues that a given author or group of authors have identified as the principal engines of change. Historians who link American religious history to immigration are likely to produce a different chronology from historians focused on the intersection of religion and politics, or the history of religiously motivated movements of social reform. And yet, a moment’s reflection will also suggest that these three sets of concerns display interesting chronological convergences, for example, with changes in U.S. immigration law and movements for civil rights during the 1960s.
Similarly, chronology and periodization are influenced by the historian’s own appraisal—whether explicit or implicit—of the cultural moment in which he or she is writing. A half-century ago, H. Shelton Smith, Robert T. Handy, and Lefferts A. Loetscher produced a chronologically organized, two-volume anthology of primary texts, American Christianity: An Historical Interpretation with Representative Documents (Scribner’s, 1963). Their sense of having entered an era of new interdenominational openness found reflection in the title of their concluding section: “The Ecumenical Awakening.” Roughly thirty years later in 1992, Mark Noll would survey his surroundings and conclude his magisterial History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Eerdmans) not with a celebrative declaration but with a question: “Wilderness Once Again?”
Finally, very few religions represented in the United States are restricted to a solely national existence. Certainly in the case of Christianity, the reach of its various communions is fully global. How does this international—indeed, intercontinental—scope of religious faiths and practices influence scholarly interpretation of the religions’ historical development in the United States?
Large scale interpretations of change across time that adequately reflect these diverse issues and historical contingencies are, I would argue, best addressed by teams of scholars committed to collaborative scholarship and willing to debate alternative proposals. Falling back on chronologies built around major wars or simply the beginning and ending of centuries is not sufficient to the task of illuminating the rich history of religions in the United States to a new generation of students.
Tags: US History, W Clark Gilpin
