The Recovery of American Religious History

Abstract

FOR the study and understanding of American culture, the recovery of American religious history may well be the most important achievement of the last thirty years. A vast and crucial area of American experience has been rescued from neglect and misunderstanding. Puritanism, Edwardsian Calvinism, revivalism, liberalism, modernism, and the social gospel have all been brought down out of the attic and put back in the historical front parlor. Out of monographic research on these and other topics, it begins to be possible to build a convincing synthesis, a synthesis independent of political history, though never unrelated to it.' Even for those students of American culture who do not find religious thought and practice intrinsically interesting, knowledge of religious history has become a necessity. This is most obviously the case for those interested in American intellectual history. In the first place, the recovery of American religious history has restored a knowledge of the mode, even the language, in which most Americans, during most of American history, did their thinking about human nature and destiny. In the second place, the recovery has necessitated, though it has not yet really affected, a reorganization. Obviously the categories of V. L. Parrington, once so satisfactory, will no longer work. One cannot, for instance, oppose French liberalism to Calvinist conservatism as the poles between which to classify both political and religious thought in the early national period. What is one to do with orthodox clergy who supported the American and for long defended the