History Of Religion In America Research Articles

Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America by Ronit Y. Stahl

Reviewed by: Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America by Ronit Y. Stahl Jessica Cooperman (bio) Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America. By Ronit Y. Stahl. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. x + 348 pp. Separating church from state is an idea that sounds eminently manageable in theory but has proven close to impossible in practice. There is perhaps no institution that offers a better example of the deeply intertwined nature of religion and the modern American state than the military chaplaincy. In Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America, Ronit Stahl offers a profoundly valuable new analysis of the military chaplaincy and its engagement with American conceptions of religion, race, gender roles, and the boundaries of state power. Earlier histories offer very solid accounts of the institutional growth and triumphs of the military chaplaincy but stop short of exploring what the institution can reveal to us about the complex dynamics of religion and the American state. Stahl’s broadly researched and well-contextualized book successfully fills this void and clearly demonstrates what the chaplaincy tells us about the history of religion in America over the past century. Stahl opens her study with World War I, when at the instigation of General John Pershing, with the assistance of his friend and confidante Episcopal Bishop Charles Brent, the chaplaincy was expanded and transformed into a professionalized component of the military, officially charged with providing for the spiritual needs of all American servicemen. As a result of both these new organizational policies and the multiple religious affiliations of the soldiers, the military chaplaincy became a crucial cite for developing a new, tri-faith—Protestant, Catholic, Jewish—understanding of American religion. Stahl follows the evolution of this tri-faith vision and examines the ways that the idea of a normative Judeo-Christian American religious tradition was celebrated and institutionalized by the military during World War II, and then challenged and transformed from the second half of the twentieth century to the present. As Stahl demonstrates, throughout this century of American military and religious history, the chaplaincy always offered more than just comfort to soldiers; it was a mechanism through which religious, racial, and gendered communities negotiated for recognition and rights from the American government. During World War I, Jews and Catholics struggled for that recognition. By the time the country emerged from World War II, they had largely achieved the status of religious insiders so long as they were willing to conform to military policies designed to promote a shared, liberal Judeo-Christian tradition. Stahl offers an [End Page 249] engaging description of the careful editing of scripts for the radio show Chaplain Jim to showcase the ways that this tradition was shaped and broadcast to the American public during the war. She also describes the ways that the racial and religious biases embedded within this definition of American religion made it woefully inadequate to addressing the needs of African American soldiers serving in a still segregated military, or of Buddhist soldiers, some of whom served in the military while their families struggled in US internment camps. By the time the US entered the war in Vietnam, Stahl makes it clear that the tri-faith model of American religion no longer reflected either the realities of American society or the demands of American soldiers and citizens. Buddhist soldiers still struggled against a Judeo-Christian conception of American religion, and they were now joined by growing numbers of Muslims in the military. African American soldiers and chaplains demanded religious engagement with issues of racism and social justice. Other religious groups, like Greek and Russian Orthodox, Seventh Day Adventists, and Mormons, who had earlier been uncomfortably categorized under “General Protestantism,” wanted recognition of their own distinctive traditions within the institutions of the military. In each of these cases, Stahl uses her study of religion in the military as a lens for considering both the chaplaincy and changing American attitudes and policies regarding religious freedoms more broadly. In the final chapters of the book, Stahl examines some of the changes in the structure of the contemporary military chaplaincy...

The Body of Faith: A Biological History of Religion in America by Robert C. Fuller (review)

The Body of Faith: A Biological History of Religion in America by Robert C. Fuller (review)

The Body of Faith: A Biological History of Religion in America. By Robert C.Fuller. Chicago History of America Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. xiv + 231. $35.00.

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 40, Issue 2 p. 79-80 Methodology and Theory The Body of Faith: A Biological History of Religion in America. By Robert C. Fuller. Chicago History of America Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. xiv + 231. $35.00. Kristen Tobey, Kristen Tobey University of PittsburghSearch for more papers by this author Kristen Tobey, Kristen Tobey University of PittsburghSearch for more papers by this author First published: 16 June 2014 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.12122_4Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume40, Issue2June 2014Pages 79-80 RelatedInformation

The Body of Faith: A Biological History of Religion in America. By Robert C. Fuller

Robert Fuller's The Body of Faith is a wonderfully ambitious and wide-ranging effort designed to bring the biological body into the history of religion in America and by extension into the study of religion more generally. In contrast to works that focus on discourse about the body, Fuller focuses on the evolved biological body in order to suggest what an interdisciplinary approach informed by recent work in the natural sciences can add to our understanding of historical events and processes. His thesis that “explaining religious thought or feeling requires at least some attention to their biological substrates” (183–184) is straightforward and at the same time challenging. It is no longer adequate, he argues, to assume that “humans come into the world as blank slates awaiting culture's imprint” (viii). Although he does not reject the postmodernist approach to the body as a site for the contestation of power, he thinks it has over-accentuated differences and underestimated the potential contributions of the biological and psychological sciences (viii–ix). Locating historical research at the critical intersection of various humanistic and scientific approaches, he argues that “historians must become more interdisciplinary or risk having their technical skills appear woefully out-of-date” (180).

The body of faith: a biological history of religion in America

postmodern view that human experience is constructed by language and culture has informed historical narratives for decades. Yet newly emerging information about the biological body now makes it possible to supplement traditional scholarly models with insights about the bodily sources of human thought and experience. The Body of Faith is the first account of American religious history to highlight the biological body. Robert C. Fuller brings a crucial new perspective to the study of American religion, showing that knowledge about the biological body deeply enriches how we explain dramatic episodes in American religious life. Fuller shows that the body's genetically evolved systems - pain responses, sexual passion, and emotions like shame and fear - have persistently shaped the ways that Americans forge relationships with nature, society, and God. first new work to appear in the Chicago History of American Religion series in decades, The Body of Faith offers a truly interdisciplinary framework for explaining the richness, diversity, and endless creativity of American religious life.

Book Review: A History of Religion in America: Jon Butler, Grant Wacker, & Randall Balmer, Religion in American Life: A Short History

Book Review: A History of Religion in America: Jon Butler, Grant Wacker, &amp; Randall Balmer, <i>Religion in American Life: A Short History</i>

The Cult of Domesticity, Southern Style

The Cult of Domesticity, Southern Style Charles F. Irons (bio) Scott Stephan . Redeeming the Southern Family: Evangelical Women and Domestic Devotion in the Antebellum South. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008. ix + 304 pp. Appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $44.95. White women in the nineteenth-century South, as they have in most times and places throughout American history, constituted a majority of the membership in most churches. Even though these women were willing to make multiple trips to the sanctuary per week when preaching was available, they nonetheless lived out most of their lives outside of the walls of the church. Churchgoing white women not only spent most of their time at home, but they also made the household the site of many of their most significant religious experiences. Within domestic spaces, women tested their future spouses' religious commitments, strove to build marriages based on Biblical ideals, raised children to receive the faith, and guided loved ones through death from this world to the next. In Redeeming the Southern Family, Scott Stephan offers an intimate portrayal of the ways in which women took on these spiritual challenges. Stephan, with his focus on domestic devotion, helps to explain why so many white Southern women frequented congregations in which the male leadership preached about the importance of retaining racial and gender hierarchies. In this way, he contributes to the flowering of scholarship in response to Ann Braude's insistence that in order "to understand the history of religion in America," where most adherents across traditions have historically been female, "one must ask what made each [religious] group's teachings and practices meaningful to its female members." This call is especially meaningful in the context of the U.S. South, for most scholars of the region have characterized white practitioners of "Southern religion" (by which they, like Stephan, generally mean evangelical Protestantism) as more concerned with maintaining racial and gender hierarchies than their Northern counterparts. Beth Barton Schweiger and Cynthia Lynn Lyerly helped to prepare the way for Stephan's contribution to this discussion, both with their own excellent work and with their explicit call for scholars, in Schweiger's words, to delineate more clearly "the power that mattered in southern churches and in the lives of Protestant women."1 Stephan answers this charge by demonstrating [End Page 253] the sorts of spiritual power that white Southern Protestant women wielded within their households. "As women struggled to redeem their families," he suggests, "they found their taxing work uniquely meaningful, offering historians an explanation for women's persistent domination of antebellum southern evangelical congregations in spite of the clergy's rhetorical celebrations of male authority" (p. 7). Profoundly influenced by scholars such as Steven Stowe and Robert Orsi, who have emphasized the "lived experience" of everyday people, Stephan turns to the private papers of Southern women—instead of congregational or denominational records—for information about their religious commitments. As Stephan himself points out, "this approach limits [his] ability to address issues of class and race"; for those women who left substantial collections of letters and/or diaries also tended to be among the most affluent (p. 13). Indeed, within his relatively small sample of twenty-one core families, eight of the women were married to Protestant clergymen, and none claimed African descent. Some readers will doubtless raise questions about the small number of families in the study and their elite status. To Stephan's great credit, however, he is as transparent about his sources as it is possible to be; a detailed appendix contains descriptions of the principal families, supplemented in many places by records from the federal census (pp. 233-39). Readers therefore have a very clear sense of the book's evidentiary base and may judge for themselves just how far down the region's socioeconomic ladder Southern women experienced spiritual empowerment in the ways that Stephan describes. Of greater interest to this reviewer than the size or status of Stephan's sample, which is more or less of a problem in most social histories, is his decision to leave Southern churches on the margins of his study. Only in the first chapter does he bring in the institutional church, and...

The Columbia Documentary History of Religion in America Since 1945 – Edited by Paul Harvey and Philip Goff

The Columbia Documentary History of Religion in America Since 1945 – Edited by Paul Harvey and Philip Goff

The Future of religion in American politics

From City Hall to the White House, from local courthouses to the Supreme Court, religion is indisputably influential in American politics. Finding the proper relationship between church and state has given rise to difficult questions and heated debates in such disparate arenas as education, abortion, immigration, medicine, warfare, and sexuality. Even though the United States Constitution expressly forbids a direct relationship between the two, religion and politics in America are inextricably linked.Charles W. Dunn's Future of Religion in American Politics traces the history of religion in America's political sphere and explores the issues concerning its continuing relevance. An examination of four eras - the founding, the Civil War, the New Deal, and the modern - suggests the appropriate interaction of religion and politics in the twenty-first century. The widely recognized contributors raise many thought-provoking questions about the extent of religious influence on the U.S. government, today and in the future.

A Coat of Many Colors: Religion and Society along the Cape Fear River of North Carolina

Starting from the arrival of the Italian sailor and explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano on the shores of North Carolina in 1524 and ending with the confluence of the “Age of Aquarius, the era of the evangelical, and the generation of the baby boomers” in Wilmington in the 1990s, Walter H. Conser Jr. provides a thorough survey of religion in the Cape Fear region, the southeastern quadrant of North Carolina, which includes nine current counties and about 15 percent of the state's landmass (p. 288). Representative of the larger South, but unrepresentative of North Carolina because of its larger-scale plantations and its myriad trading connections with the outside world, the Cape Fear region upholds some common generalizations about “southern religion” while contradicting others. In many ways, the region is a microcosm of the larger history of religion in America. Conser traces the transition from establishment to religious liberty; the rise of the voluntary associations (especially denominations) as a predominant form of American religious life; the “religious variety (often tied to ethnicity) characteristic of the colonial era … and its subsequent eclipse” by transethnic evangelical Protestantism (p. 3); the diversification of the populace (and hence of religion) in the area according to nineteenth- and twentieth-century patterns of immigration and economic opportunity; and the ongoing “tension between a traditionalist and a modernist sensibility” (p. 5), as seen especially in liturgical controversies and church architectural styles. To put it another way, the author takes us from Native American practices, to colonization and religious establishment, through the Revolution and the rise of denominationalism, through the Civil War and the rise of the New South, to ethnic and religious diversification in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and, finally, to modern pluralism. Along the way, we learn about local people, institutions, and churches (most especially about their architectural styles), with a degree of detail and specificity that could only have come from a historian who is also a local resident.

The Columbia Documentary History of Religion in America Since 1945. Edited by Harvey Paul and Goff Philip. Columbia Contemporary American Religion Series. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. xxi + 557 pp. $75.00 cloth.

The Columbia Documentary History of Religion in America Since 1945. Edited by Harvey Paul and Goff Philip. Columbia Contemporary American Religion Series. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. xxi + 557 pp. $75.00 cloth.

Religions of the United States in practice

The Religions of the United States in Practice is a rich anthology of primary sources with accompanying essays that examines religious behavior in America. From praying in an early American synagogue to reading anti-Catholic novels to performing Haitian Voudou baptism, the volumes explore faith through action. The documents and essays consider the religious practices of average people - praying, singing, healing, teaching, imagining, and persuading. Some documents are formal liturgies, while others texts describe more spontaneous religious actions. Because religious practices also take place in the imagination, dreams, visions, and fictional accounts are also included. Accompanying each primary document is an essay that sets the religious practice in its historical and theological context - making this volume ideal for classroom use and accessible to general readers. The introductory essays explain the various meanings of religious practices as lived out in churches and synagogues, in parlors and fields, beside rivers, on lecture platforms, and in the streets. Volume I moves from Colonial days to the end of the nineteenth century. Among the fascinating subjects covered are Early American hymns. Dutch-American wedding ceremonies, witchcraft in Puritan culture, Mormon healing rituals, Muskogee corn ceremonies, anti-Catholic pornography, debates over cremation. Volume 2 continues into the twentieth century, exploring such practices as Pentecostal prayer services, the singing of Hanukkah songs, debates over ordaining women, Buddhist chanting, the guitar mass, speaking in tongues, vision quests, Jewish mourning practices, and Charismatic renewal among Latino Catholics. The Religions of the United States in Practice offers a sampling of religious perspectives that approximates the living texture of popular religious thought and practice in the United States. The history of religion in America is more than the story of institutions and famous people. This anthology presents an engrossing and nuanced story composed of the everyday actions and thoughts of lay men and women.

The linked classroom as studio: connectivity and the etymology of networks

Using a developing multimedia network to connect three campuses, undergraduate public relations students linked with national spokespersons, editors, journalists and scholars to discuss the role of mediated religion, its impact on public opinion, and on popular culture. Historically, the tactics of public relations are closely intertwined with the history of religion in America: The Religious Public Relations Society of America is older than the Public Relations Society of America. So the innovation in the Media, Religion and Cultural Identity course was not in our subject matter, but in our uses of electronic communication and technology to construct a learning community, to turn the laboratory into a studio, where both teacher and student learned through performance. The article argues for integrating spiritual intelligence in the PR curriculum.

The Search for an American Catholicism

JAY P. DOLAN President of the American Catholic Historical Association 1995 The Catholic Historical Review VOL. LXXXII APRIL, 1996 Ñ072 THE SEARCH FOR AN AMERICAN CATHOLICISM BY Jay P. Dolan* Vetera novis augere etperficere From the very first moment Europeans set foot on America's shores they have sought to adapt their culture and customs to the environment of the New World. This was very evident in the area of religion. For more than one hundred and fifty years Jews in America had to learn how to survive without a rabbi to lead them in prayer. This meant that throughout the colonial period lay men became the dominant religious leaders in the local synagogue. In Virginia the first English settlers wanted to fashion a church that would be in conformity with the Church of England "as neere as may be." Since no bishop was willing to settle in Virginia, this pioneer generation was forced to establish "an Episcopal church without bishops."1 Because of this situation lay vestrymen took control of church affairs. The first generation of Catholic settlers in Maryland had to learn how to govern a colony in which Protestants outnumbered Catholics. For Cecil Calvert, the founder of *Mr. Dolan is a professor ofhistory in the University of Notre Dame. He read this paper as his presidential address at a luncheon held in the Atlanta Hilton Hotel on Saturday,January 6, 1996,during the seventy-sixth annual meeting ofthe American Catholic Historical Association. He wishes to thank Martin Marty, Walter Nugent, Scott Appleby, John McGreevy , and Kathleen Sprows for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this address . The Latin epigraph may be translated,"To enlarge and enrich the old with the new." 'William H. Seiler, "The Anglican Parish in Virginia," in James Morton Smith (ed.), Seventeenth Century America: Essays in Colonial History (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1959), p. 123, and DanielJ. Boorstin, TheAmericans: The Colonial Experience (NewYork, 1958), p. 123. 169 170 THE SEARCH FOR AN AMERICAN CATHOLICISM the Maryland colony, this meant that civil harmony was of primary importance ; for this reason religion was to remain a private affair, neither shaping the destiny of the colony nor impeding its progress. The first Jesuits in Maryland were not pleased with this idea. They wanted the Catholic Church and its clergy to enjoy a special place in the new colony, a privileged status that was commonplace at that time in Europe . Calvert would not give in to their demands. If the Jesuits were to remain in Maryland, they would have to do so without any special privileges . The Jesuits stayed, and Catholicism in America became a church free and independent of state control. Each of these three stories suggests that new models of church and denomination were to emerge in the NewWorld. The first generation of European settlers was compelled to adapt its ways to the challenges posed by the New Worlds geographical, social, and political environment . Thus, the history of religion in America has been a history of the adaptation of the ancient religious traditions, be they Christian,Jewish, Muslim, or Hindu, to the challenges posed by the New World environment . For Catholics their history has been a continuous search for an American Catholicism, a Catholicism rooted in the ancient Catholic tradition but always seeking to adapt itself to the culture of what we now call the United States. In 1966 1 began my graduate studies in the history ofAmerican Christianity at the University of Chicago. During these past thirty years the historical study of religion in the United States, and of Catholicism in particular, has undergone substantial change. Many of us have lived through these changes and they have been truly remarkable. The emergence of the new social history in the 1960s sparked an interest in intensive studies of individual communities. With this focus on community studies the local parish became a concern of historians, and this has remained true to the present. For this new generation of historians the religion of the people rather than the activities of the prelates has become a primary focus of study. The growth and development of immigration history sparked an interest in the study of immigrant groups; the...

Documentary History of Religion in America. Volumes 1 and 2, edited by Edwin S. Gaustad

Documentary History of Religion in America. Volumes 1 and 2, edited by Edwin S. Gaustad

The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy.

In The Churching of America, 1776-2005 Roger Finke and Rodney Stark once again revolutionize the way we think about religion in America. Extending the argument that the nation's religious environment acts as a free market economy, this extensively revised and expanded edition offers new research, statistics, and stories that document increased participation in religious groups in the twenty-first century. Adding to the thorough coverage of mainline religious groups, new chapters chart the remarkable development and growth of African American churches from the early nineteenth century forward. Finke and Stark show how, like other upstart sects, these churches openly competed for adherents and demonstrate how American norms of religious freedom allowed African American churches to construct organizational havens with little outside intervention. This edition also includes new sections on the ethnic religious communities of recent immigrants - stories that echo those told of ethnic religious enclaves in the nineteenth century. Bringing together timely new information and evidence, this provocative book insists, more than ever, on a major reevaluation of established ideas about American religious institutions. Written with lively prose, it will stir debate within church and academic communities, as well as among laypersons interested in the history of religion in America.

"Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Left to Do": Choosing a Textbook for Religion in America America: Religions and Religion Catherine L. Albanese Exploring American Religion Denise Lardner Carmody John Tully Carmody Religion in America Julia Mitchell Corbett A Religious History of America Edwin Scott Gaustad Religion in America: An Historical Account of the Development of American Religious Life

"Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Left to Do": Choosing a Textbook for Religion in America America: Religions and Religion Catherine L. Albanese Exploring American Religion Denise Lardner Carmody John Tully Carmody Religion in America Julia Mitchell Corbett A Religious History of America Edwin Scott Gaustad Religion in America: An Historical Account of the Development of American Religious Life

The Problem of the History of Religion in America

Half a year before this paper was read before a plenary session of the American Academy of Religion (26 October 1969), the program committee had requested an essay dealing in some comprehensive way with the field of American religious history. Because I would in any case have to be thinking about the introduction to my own “religious history of the American people,” I agreed. The title was sufficiently broad; and goodness knows the problems of this subject area are sufficiently large. Aside from innumerable large and small questions of fact there are the countless questions of emphasis and interpretation, not to mention the problem of discerning an overarching theme. I also confess great sympathy with Max Lerner's comment on the ten years he spent onAmerica as a Civilization(1957). “I found when I came to the end of the decade,” he said, “that a number of things I had written about America were no longer valid. The American civilization had been changing drastically right under my fingertips as I was writing about it.” The present-day historian's predicament is, if anything, more difficult than Lerner's in that the sixties, by contrast with the fifties, have experienced a veritable earthquake of revisionism which has profoundly altered our interpretation of the entire course of American history. By reason of its screaming moral dilemmas, moreover, the decade had an especially rude impact on long accepted views of religious history. But enough of this: let us consider the substantive questions.

The Immigrants and Their Gods: A New Perspective in American Religious History

Twenty years ago Jerald Brauer wrote an essay on the writing of American church history entitled, “Changing Perspectives on Religion in America.” In this essay he noted that “change in perspective marks the writing of the history of religion in America.” After discussing the work of Robert Baird and William Warren Sweet, the two historians whose perspectives most influenced the writing of American church history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries respectively, Brauer then directed his attention to a third and new perspective. This new perspective had developed in the post-World War II era and was the result of the work of Sidney E. Mead, Sydney E. Ahlstrom, Winthrop S. Hudson, and others. Brauer described the new perspective by pointing out how it differed from the work of Sweet. It was clear to Brauer, however, that no one historian or school of historians had yet emerged whose perspective was able to dominate the landscape in the manner that Baird and Sweet had. There really was no new single perspective, but a variety of approaches and interpretations. In other words, in the late 1960s the discipline of American church history was in a state of flux, and “a number of young historians” were, in Brauer's words, “anxious to develop a new perspective through which to view the development and nature of Christianity in America.”

The Problem of the History of Religion in America

The Problem of the History of Religion in America