Religion in Early America

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Ra ELIGION stood at the very center of early American life, sometimes obviously, sometimes in convoluted, difficult ways. Christian holidays paced the calendar, now Protestant not Catholic. Notions of providence transformed simple settlement into transcendent venture throughout the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century, the Anglican itinerant Charles Woodmason worried that so many preachers pretend[ed] to know the best fashion in which Christs Coat is to be worn, that in the Carolina backcountry none will put it on. Yet lay men and women remained fascinated; Bring no Dogs with You-they are very troublesome, Woodmason warned settlers attending his services.1 Certainly, religion made death as fathomable as it could be made, a value amply demonstrated in the gravestones found throughout the colonies, not just in New England. Early American historians long have recognized religion's capacity to comprehend and express larger issues of life and society. Beginning with Perry Miller's Errand into the Wilderness, perhaps the most influential article ever published on American religion,2 colonialists moved far beyond the old church to find in religion both a means and an end for AmericansNative, African, and European-in deciphering their experience. Indeed, it is not too daring to suggest that early American historians especially signaled religion's importance throughout American history generally, whether in the debates on gender, ethnicity, and slavery in the nineteenth century or in the wars over secularization, civil rights, and culture in the twentieth. This topical issue on religion in early America assays the fascinating, the unfamiliar, and the interpretatively vexed in a field notable for range and depth. Several articles came through an open call for papers and were evaluated by an anonymous, valiant three-person jury that read more than thirty manuscripts; other articles came through the Quarterly's regular submission channels; and one, the sweeping historiographical essay by Charles Cohen, was specially commissioned by the editors. The articles survey the past and move toward a fascinating future. Cohen demonstrates how the broadening work on early American religion