American Protestantism Research Paper

C u r r e n t s in

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AMERICAN SCHOLARSHIP
S E R I E S

C
A B

Religious Histor y
I B L I O G R A P H I C A L

AMERICAN

ur rents
E
S S A Y

Catherine L. Albanese
U NIVERSITY
OF

C ALIFORNIA , S ANTA B ARBARA

“...American religious history— and of American religion, which it seeks to narrate and interpret—is surely lively and growing, nourished by the works of colleagues in related disciplines and challenged by new discoveries about the past and by the ever-changing religious situation in the pluralistic twentyfirst-century United States.

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Cover image STAINED GLASS WINDOW THANKSGIVING SQUARE CHAPEL, DALLAS, TEXAS, USA by John Elk Designed by Cynthia Malecki

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Contents

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Introduction

The
After this sweeping narrative, it is possible to move in any number of directions. Keeping the Marty focus on the social and political leads in the direction of more specialized community studies of how, under closer observation, these processes work, as in historical sociologist David G. Hackett’s The Rude Hand of Innovation: Religion and Social Order in Albany, New York, 1652–1836. Moving into broader, yet still specialized, regional studies that foreground evangelicalism, particularly in the nineteenth century, there is the authoritative study by Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the Old South, which surveys evangelical Protestantism in the region from 1750 to 1860. With a focus on Methodism for much of the same period and region, the more recent The Way of the Cross Leads Home: The Domestication of American Methodism, by A. Gregory Schneider, provides a strongly cultural approach. For studies of evangelical Protestantism among African Americans in the nineteenth-century South, Albert J. Raboteau’s Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution’ in the Antebellum South is the best single source. This may be supplemented by the older work of Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, which deals with much of the same material. For the Appalachian region, often
The Transcendentalists, it should be noted, were nineteenth-century pioneers in exploring Asian religions. Their work in that regard is scrutinized in American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions by Arthur Versluis. And Carl T. Jackson broadens the scope of the nineteenth-century inquiry concerning Asia in America in The Oriental Religions and American Thought: Nineteenth-Century Explorations. In the mid-nineteenth century, American spiritualism (attempted communication with spirits of the dead) began to spring up on the fringes of liberal Christianity. R. Laurence Moore examines some of the history of this spiritualist growth and some of the phenomena to which it leads in his In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture. Bret E. Carroll, in a newer study, goes over some of the same ground and especially explores the ritual life of spiritualists in his Spiritualism in Antebellum America. And in Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, Ann Braude demonstrates the links between trance speech among female spiritualist mediums and their later public speaking and social activism on behalf of women’s rights. Religious experimentation became totalistic when it encompassed complete lifestyle changes in communitarian living arrangements. The Transcendentalists had created two