Religion in American History A Reader

by Butler, Jon; Stout, Harry S.

• ISBN13: 9780195097764
• ISBN10: 0195097769
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-09-11
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

At the end of the twentieth century, religion seems to be ubiquitous in America. Its existence and influence are especially apparent in our politics, but its presence is most deeply felt in our personal lives and experience. Was it always this way? Offering a rich selection of classic and recent scholarship, Religion in American History: A Reader presents an extraordinary portrait of religion's fate across four centuries of the American experience. Its essays cover major issues in American history and religion, detailing religion's purposein American life and examining many topics that are either ignored or minimized in similar books. It addresses the decline and revival of American Indian religion; women's powerful roles in American religion; immigration, assimilation, and separation and how they have contributed to the Americanreligious experience; political activism; and religious bigotry. It also discusses Catholics, Protestants and fundamentalism, Mormons, and Jews. Selected debates encourage readers to test conflicting interpretations about religion's impact on American history, and original documents trace religion'sinfluence on slavery, race, and politics from the colonial era to the late twentieth century. Divided into three sections - colonial era, nineteenth century, and twentieth century - and featuring essays by prominent American historians, this volume serves as an excellent text for courses in American Religion, the History of Religion, and Religion and Culture. It is enhanced by helpfulintroductions to each essay and ample suggestions for further reading. Uniquely comprehensive, Religion in American History: A Reader serves as a one-volume tour through America's tumultuous, varied, and often misunderstood religious past.

Author Biography

Jon Butler is William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and History and Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University. He is the author of Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (1990), The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New World Society (1990), Power, Authority, and the Origins of American Denominational Order: The English Churches in the Delaware Valley, 1680-1730 (1978), and numerous articles and essays.
Harry S. Stout is Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Christianity at Yale University and the John B. Madden Master of Berkeley College. He is the general editor of OUP's Religion and America Series and co-editor of New Directions in American Religious History (OUP, 1997). He is author of The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (OUP, 1986), and co-editor of Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience (OUP, 1988), and Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, and the Representation of American Culture (OUP, 1993).

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION	1	(4)
PART I THE COLONIAL PERIOD	5	(138)
1. THE SPIRITUAL CRISIS OF EUROPEAN COLONIZATION The European Impact on the Culture of a Northeastern Algonquian Tribe: An Ecological Interpretation	7	(20)
Calvin Martin
2. DID THE PURITANS START IT ALL? Errand Into the Wilderness	27	(15)
Perry Miller
3. WILLIAM PENN AND THE ENGLISH ORIGINS OF AMERICAN RELIGIOUS PLURALISM The World and William Penn	42	(31)
Edmund S. Morgan
4. DOCUMENT: CHRISTIANITY SHAPES AMERICAN SLAVERY A Sermon to Maryland Slaves, 1749	73	(15)
Thomas Bacon
5. DEBATE: "THE GREAT AWAKENING"--FACT OR FICTION?	88	(41)
Religion, Communications, and the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
Harry S. Stout
Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretative Fiction
Jon Butler
6. THE CHALLENGE OF A WOMAN'S RELIGION The Spiritual Pilgrimage of Sarah Osborn (1714-1796)	129	(14)
Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe
PART II THE NINETEENTH CENTURY	143	(190)
7. IMMIGRANTS AND RELIGION IN AMERICA The Immigrants and Their Gods: A New Perspective in American Religious History	145	(12)
Jay P. Dolan
8. FEMALE LANGUAGE IN THE AMERICAN RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE The Feminization of American Religion: 1800-1860	157	(22)
Barbara Welter
9. THE RISE OF AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL: MORMONISM Evangelical America and Early Mormonism	179	(19)
Gordon S. Wood
10. WHAT RELIGIOUS PLURALISM MEANT Insiders and Outsiders in American Historical Narrative and American History	198	(24)
R. Laurence Moore
11. DOCUMENTS AND DEBATE: ON WHOSE SIDE? GOD, SLAVERY, AND THE CIVIL WAR	222	(17)
Address on "Evangelical Flogging," Delivered at Market Hall, Syracuse, N.Y., September 24, 1847
Frederick Douglass
The Christian Doctrine of Slavery: God's Work in God's Way
George D. Armstrong
12. THE OCCULT IN THE AMERICAN RELIGIOUS TRADITION Women in Occult America	239	(16)
Mary Farrell Bednarowski
13. INDIANS, MISSIONS, AND CULTURAL CONFLICT The Lakota Ghost Dance: An Ethnohistorical Account	255	(17)
Raymond J. DeMallie
14. RELIGION AND POLITICS Ethnoreligious Political Behavior in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Voting, Values, Cultures	272	(21)
Robert P. Swierenga
15. THE CREATION OF AN AFRICAN-AMERICAN PREACHING STYLE The Preachers	293	(21)
William E. Montgomery
16. THE RISE OF AMERICAN FUNDAMENTALISM Fundamentalism as an American Phenomenon, A Comparison with English Evangelicalism	314	(19)
George Marsden
PART III THE TWENTIETH CENTURY	333	(180)
17. RELIGION AND SOCIOLOGY Secularization: The Inherited Model	335	(10)
Bryan Wilson
18. COMMERCIAL CULTURE AND AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY The Easter Parade: Piety, Fashion, and Display	345	(25)
Leigh Eric Schmidt
19. DEBATE: 1920-1940--DARK AGES OF MODERN AMERICAN PROTESTANTISM?	370	(27)
The American Religious Depression, 1925-1935
Robert T. Handy
Fundamentalist Institutions and the Rise of Evangelical Protestantism, 1929-1942
Joel A. Carpenter
20. JUDAISM AND THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE Seating and the American Synagogue	397	(15)
Jonathan D. Sarna
21. THE UNSPEAKABLE RELATIONSHIP: RELIGION AND BIGOTRY IN AMERICA Antisemitism in the Depression Era (1933-1939)	412	(29)
Leonard Dinnerstein
22. CATHOLICISM, GENDER, AND MODERN MIRACLES "He Keeps Me Going": Women's Devotion to Saint Jude Thaddeus and the Dialectics of Gender in American Catholicism, 1929-1965	441	(27)
Robert A. Orsi
23. MARTIN LUTHER KING AND THE SECULAR POWER OF RELIGIOUS RHETORIC Martin Luther King and the Style of the Black Sermon	468	(18)
Hortense J. Spillers
24. DEBATE AND DOCUMENTS: RELIGION, SOCIETY, AND POLITICS IN MODERN TIMES	486	(27)
Jesus: The Liberator
Joseph A. Johnson, Jr.
A Pastorol Message: Economic Justice for All U.S. Catholic Bishops
The Imperative of Moral Involvement
Jerry Falwell
INDEX	513