The Future of American Religious History: Prospectus, Agenda, Transatlantic "Problematique"

Abstract

ToWENTY years ago Henry F. May submitted an essay to the American Historical Review that by his own account very nearly ended up in the editor's wastebasket rather than on readers' desks. manuscript was his now-famous i964 article, The Recovery of American Religious History, a seminal analysis that reflected the extraordinary transformation of writings on American religious from drowsy denominational chronicles to a major instrument of American cultural analysis. Crowned by Perry Miller's work in intellectual history, yet already anticipating the rise of social history, the scholarship on American religion and culture constituted what May rightly called the most remarkable national historiographical achievement of the previous thirty years.1 Despite broad shifts of methodology and interpretation, the study of religion has remained central to American historical scholarship throughout the two decades since May published his article. Local and community studies in the vanguard of the new social history probed the social consequences of religious belief, first (and too exclusively) in early New England, then in the southern and middle colonies. Others pointed up the centrality of religion to the Revolution and the Civil War, to political and social reform, and to electoral politics, all without adopting any uniform interpretation of religion's role in these matters.2 A third group of writings