Religion and American Culture

Abstract

Catherine L. Albanese. Sons of the Fathers: The Civil Religion of the American Revolution. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976. 274 + xiv pp. Clifford E. Clark, Jr. Henry Ward Beecher: Spokesman for a Middle-Class America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. 288 pp. Ann Douglas. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Avon Books, 1977. 504 + viii pp. Robert T. Handy. A History of the Churches in the United States and Canada. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. 471 + ix pp. William G. McLoughlin. Revivals, Awakenings and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607-1977. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978. 239 + xv pp. Once upon a time—and it was not so very long ago—religious history in America was in the hands of the denominational chroniclers and the filiopietistic biographers. These men and women told the story of the upward and onward march of American denominational religion as settlement expanded and population grew, and recorded the obstacles surmounted and problems faced by the clerical leaders of the various religious groups. Religious history, like most American history, was told largely in progressive terms, but it was in a distinctly separate compartment from secular history. As the tale of American religion became less clearly one of triumphant growth, and as historical study became more sophisticated, religious history was gradually integrated into the larger historical picture, usually as an aspect of American social and cultural development. The key innovators in this integration were the scholars of New England Puritanism —Kenneth Murdoch, Samuel Eliot Morison, and especially Perry Miller—who reacted against both the clerical monopoly of religious development and the secular hostility of historians like James Truslow Adams to the close relationship of church and state in early New England history. Over the past forty years, the history of religion has become a central feature of American social and cultural history, but until recently, only a part of the story.