Introduction

Abstract

Abstract In 1977, Religious History was largely identified as a subfield of American intellectual history. When Henry May described the “recovery” of religious history, his subject matter was dominated by Perry Miller and the “Puritan synthesis” that ran from John Winthrop and Jonathan Edwards through Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American Renaissance up to Reinhold Niebuhr and neo-orthodoxy. Yet as substantial as the recovery was, it was under siege from almost the time May wrote his article. In fact, both intellectual history and religious history were already challenged in 1977, by the “New Social History,” and the tone of the conference at Wingspread that year reflected this beleaguered status. The mood of intellectual (and religious) history in 1977 was defensive. The New Social History had begun its invasion of all fields in American history and threatened to turn the mainline of intellectual history as it had evolved since the 19 50s into a sideline. In religion, the threat was doubly severe. Mainline Protestant denominations, which had inspired much of the canon until then, were themselves “declining” at a precipitous rate.