Faith in the New Millennium: The Future of Religion and American Politics

Abstract

Faith in the New Millennium is based on an exciting question: What would happen if the leading scholars from the youngest generation of historians of American religion used their historical research as a springboard for understanding the complicated relationship of religion and politics in the contemporary United States? This book project began in 2007 as a conversation among the Young Scholars of American Religion—a gathering of the most promising recent Ph.D.'s in the field, selected through a competitive process—and then evolved through a 2012 conference, and finally became this collection of essays, published in 2016. During the nine years in which Faith in the New Millennium was being created, the nation's political contours changed considerably, and I sense that the book's essays did as well. When the volume was conceived, George W. Bush was still president, the Tea Party movement did not yet exist, and same-sex marriage was legally recognized in only one state. Nearly a decade later, at the close of Barack Obama's presidency, both liberalism and conservatism have experienced unexpected crises, and the relationship between religion and politics in the United States appears more complicated and uncertain than ever. The essays in Faith in the New Millennium explore these rapid changes by placing them in “deep historical” perspective, using insights from the past two centuries of American history to make sense of a political landscape in which the traditional religious powerbrokers in politics—including the Christian Right, the Protestant mainline, and the American Catholic Church—have seen their influence upended (p. 4).