Puritans, Padres, and Pentecostals: Perspectival and Pedagogical Shifts in Americana Church History

Abstract

In this article, I invite the guild to rethink received paradigms and perspectives in the study and teaching of American church and religious history. The common additive approach of the last decades that folds in Latino/a experience usually reflects new themes of contemporary immigration and diversity, but rarely considers constitutive contributions to foundational stories or is conscious of perspectival constraints. In the spirit of previous ASCH presidential addresses, the proposed introspection weighs the cost of the refractions, redactions, and omissions. Through a reconsideration of seminality—whether agential or textual—in Spanish colonial expansion (Esteban of Azamor), in the Puritan colonial imaginary, and in Latino/Latin American Pentecostal growth, and of anachronistic geographical boundaries in the case of New Mexico curate Antonio José Martínez, this address calls for greater clarity in our understanding of the variegated contours of Americana church history.