Protestant Mainstream Research Articles

Family Corporation v. Minstrel Feminism: Reproducing Religious Freedom from Hobby Lobby to Notorious R.B.G.

This article interrogates feminist frameworks for understanding the racial and sexual politics of United States secularism. It theorizes the history of religious freedom law as a history of racial performance. Reading the aesthetic practices surrounding the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case and the subsequent consumer culture flurry around Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and building on accounts of religious freedom law as a vehicle for launching competing rights-based claims, the author shows the processes through which Hobby Lobby’s Christian family secured its religious exemption by conjuring ghosts of settler dispossession of indigenous people, even as an elderly Jewish justice was made to refuse submissive white femininity in the likeness of rapper Biggie Smalls. Circulated as competing minstrel brands, both performances consolidate the anti-Black and settler colonial grounds on which religious freedom laws—as well as some forms of mainstream protest against them—have flourished under neoliberal capitalism.

America's Religious Crossroads: Faith and Community in the Emerging Midwest by Stephen T. Kissel

Reviewed by: America's Religious Crossroads: Faith and Community in the Emerging Midwest by Stephen T. Kissel Marcus Gallo (bio) Keywords Old Northwest, Midwest, Religion, Protestantism, Religious development America's Religious Crossroads: Faith and Community in the Emerging Midwest. By Stephen T. Kissel. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. Pp. 268. Cloth, $110.00.) Examining the Old Northwest until 1848, the year that Wisconsin became a state, Stephen T. Kissel describes the religious "bonds, networks, and relationships that allowed these isolated western settlements to evolve in their regional unity and identity" (2). Kissel tackles a variety of topics, including home worship and hospitality, religious literature and schooling, church-building, camp revivals, Bible societies, and social reform movements. These religious undertakings helped develop the Old Northwest, providing structure to the region prior to the establishment of "stable civic and political infrastructures," when "the separation of church and state became more clearly defined by civic and political policies" (145–46). By midcentury, as the pioneer period ended, the Northwest was home to a "religious mosaic" encompassing a variety of sects that still flavored local society (145). [End Page 650] Kissel's chapters all follow a similar structure: Each looks extensively at how mainline Protestant sects handled the aforementioned undertakings, then touches briefly on similar developments among northwestern minorities: Catholics; Blacks and Indians; and Mormon, Shaker, and Rappite utopians. The repetition of this structure can leave these sections on minorities feeling tacked on; the book offers far more to readers interested in the experiences of white Protestants than to those seeking to learn about Black churches or missionary efforts among Native American communities. While not overly focused on religious violence, the rough-and-tumble nature of the Old Northwest emerges from numerous examples. In Kissel's words, "Being able to hold one's own in a fight was regarded with equal value to honesty, because it proved a man could stand his ground and defend his principles" (119). In some instances, the dividing lines could be between believers and unbelievers. Most of the inhabitants of Jackson, Michigan, and Vermillion County, Illinois, resented the presence of itinerant preachers wishing to spread religion. In Plainfield, Michigan, the settlers threatened to ride the preacher out of town on a wooden horse for insulting their integrity by preaching about the evils of prostitution. Perhaps in response to this sort of hostility, one intrepid preacher rode his circuit "with a loaded pistol and a dirk," causing the Western Methodist Conference to publicly reprimand him, then eventually drive him out of the church (116). Similarly, camp revivals attracted throngs of all sorts, including liquor salesmen, to the consternation of religious participants. Revivals could become sites of vandalism and violence when rowdy crowds of youths sought to entertain themselves by disrupting proceedings, prompting the faithful to arm occasionally themselves to maintain order. In other instances, mainstream Protestants moved beyond the defensive, targeting minority sects with violence. In 1810, convinced that local Shakers had been seducing children to run away and then abusing them, a crowd of five hundred armed men entered Union Village, Ohio, and demanded that the Shakers there renounce their faith. The vigilantes left after the Shakers convinced them that they had not, in fact, been maltreating the children of the village. What emerges is a picture of a society that lacked a monopoly on violence; religious organization helped fill the void of authority. Kissel's investigation of church disciplinary procedures is most revealing of the ways in which religious structures overlapped with civil structures in the Old Northwest, providing something of a surrogate for the state. [End Page 651] When forming, Protestant churches adopted strict rules of decorum. For example, Methodists banned "swearing, drunkenness, profaning the Sabbath, failing to attend public worship, fighting, gambling, transacting dishonest business, participating in the slave trade, and 'the putting on of gold and costly apparel'" (107). Enthusiastic lay members formed committees to strengthen the faith of the spiritually conflicted and investigate unacceptable behavior among their congregations. They punished the guilty by demanding public confessions or, for more extreme behavior, suspending or expelling members from the church. Over time, churches expanded their scope to handle disputes that blurred the line between religious...

Corpses and the Protestant cult of the dead

Scholars of the body and religion readily acknowledge that corpses have agency. ‘The work of the dead,’ as Thomas Laqueur puts it, includes everything from sacralizing the landscape to creating imagined communities. Scholars have been less successful, however, in documenting the continuing relations between ordinary Protestants and their departed loved ones. In their focus on cemetery designers and political leaders, historians have overlooked the spiritual journals – mostly by women – that document relations between the living and dead. This article argues that corpses were central to such relations, even for mainstream Protestants whose ministers insisted otherwise. This argument challenges the way most scholars think of Protestantism. Rather than considering it as a religion of internal beliefs and creeds, I emphasize the material and tactile foundations of Protestant belief. And rather than seeing a religion dedicated to maintaining the Reformation’s divide between the living and dead, I put relations with the dead at the heart of lived Protestantism.

Secularism and Hermeneutics by Yael Almog

Reviewed by: Secularism and Hermeneutics by Yael Almog Brandon Bloch Secularism and Hermeneutics. By Yael Almog. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. 216. Cloth $65.00. ISBN 978-0812251258. The past three decades have witnessed a sea change in scholarship on secularism and secularization. If once-dominant narratives described the evacuation of religion from modern public life, theorists such as Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood have redefined secularism as a tool of governance by which modern states seek to harness and regulate acceptable forms of religious expression. At the same time, historians of eighteenth-century Europe—the fulcrum on which traditional understandings of secularization rest—have challenged simplistic oppositions of religion and Enlightenment. Works such as Jonathan Sheehan's The Enlightenment Bible (2005) and David Sorkin's The Religious Enlightenment (2008) have shown instead how reappropriations of religious texts have shaped new concepts of citizenship, culture, and law. In Secularism and Hermeneutics, Yael Almog synthesizes and advances this wide-ranging literature to contend that modern hermeneutics, often considered the quintessential practice of secular interpretation, emerged out of Enlightenment-era religious conflict. Blending readings of Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich Schleiermacher, G.W.F. Hegel, and others with pointed interventions in contemporary theory, Almog invites readers to rethink not only commonplaces about the Enlightenment but also their own interpretive practices. At the core of Secularism and Hermeneutics lies an analysis of Enlightenment efforts to read the Bible not as a sacred text of revelation, but as a universal document of human culture. The novel hermeneutics that arose in the German-speaking Enlightenment, Almog argues, centered around a new vision of the Bible as the basis for a universal reading community. Efforts to achieve this community, however, foundered on the confessional diversity of German societies, exemplified in the battle over Jewish emancipation. For the central protagonists of Enlightenment hermeneutics—the Pietist philosopher Johann Georg Hamann as well as Herder, Schleiermacher, and Hegel—the Hebrew Bible recorded the origins of humanity's religious consciousness, but its meaning had become obscured through an insular Jewish communalism. It was Christianity that gave voice to the Bible's universal core and could interpret its message for the modern state. Yet Jewish authors spoke back, seeking inclusion in the Enlightenment public sphere without abandoning their religious heritage. Almog reconstructs the emergence of modern hermeneutics from [End Page 401] the entanglements of Christian and Jewish thought, as both sides sought to mediate confessional commitments with articulations of shared humanity. The first half of the text centers on the tension between Protestant efforts to create a universal reading culture, underpinned by supersessionist logics and the defense of Jewish reading practices advanced most notably by the Orthodox Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Herder and Goethe deplored the Hebrew language as a barrier to comprehension, regarding the work of translation as both a lamentable loss of meaning and a necessary condition of universal readership. Mendelssohn, by contrast, declared Judaism a forerunner of Enlightenment toleration, with its emphasis on oral transmission and refusal to coerce belief in God. Drawing on postcolonial approaches to the encounters of Islam and Western thought, Almog characterizes Mendelssohn's position as one of "situated universalism" (91). Rather than breaking with Enlightenment universalism from the standpoint of Judaism, Mendelssohn insisted on their interdependence. Although not framed as such, Almog's reading of Mendelssohn marks a break with critical theorists of secularism such as Asad and Mahmood. While the latter seek to expose political secularism as an effort to reinscribe Protestant norms as standards of liberal citizenship, Almog argues instead that secular hermeneutics emerged in contentious negotiation among confessional models of reading, with none conclusively imposing its own standards. The book's second part shifts from philosophy to literary criticism, spotlighting how novels such as Heinrich Heine's Der Rabbi von Bacherach (1840) and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff's Die Judenbuche (1842) challenged the constricted (and antisemitic) universalisms promoted by the Protestant mainstream. In Heine's novel, Almog finds a moving testament to the persistence of Jewish suffering perpetuated not only by self-imposed separation but by the scapegoating and bigotry of the Christian majority—a foil to Protestants such as Schleiermacher, who rooted Jewish difference in a lack...

아나뱁티스트들의 유아세례 논쟁 - 원죄 사상과 자유의지를 중심으로

In the Christian Liturgy, baptism is a ritual of recognition of membership in the church and an external sign that symbolizes the beginning of communion with Christ. The most fierce struggle in Christian history over baptism was during the 16th century Reformation. The Anabaptist group aimed at a third church form different from those of Roman Catholic church and magisterial Protestant churches. Anabaptists were eager to reinterpret and apply the existing theological traditions in their context, hoping to restore apostolic form of the Christian church. In the process, they quarreled with the Roman Catholic Church and mainstream reformers. As a result, numerous anabaptists were persecuted or martyred.<BR> Anabaptists’ claims of baptism led to their separation from the Roman Catholic Church as well as the Protestant mainstream churches in relation to the nature of the church, church order, interpretation of the Bible, and understanding of the church and state. In short, the Anabaptist group’s basic beliefs, theology, the uniqueness of doctrine, and their identity were formed around the understanding of baptism.<BR> Although many scholars have analyzed the history and theology of Anabaptists, few studies have analyzed the theological and doctrinal aspects of the key subject of baptism, which is directly connected to their church form. What is the theological rationale for Anabaptists’ rejection of infant baptism and advocacy for adult baptism? This article argues that the characteristics of baptism, which Anabaptists have argued, are fully revealed when analyzed from the perspective of the idea of original sin and the theory of free will.<BR> For this task, this article will analyze the baptismal theory of Anabaptists and analyze the issues and core values through the ideas and discussions of contemporary reformers, especially Calvin. In addition, this article will clarify that Anabaptists’ baptismal theology is the key to supporting their church vision and ideals, and argue that their baptismal theology can grasp its full meaning when grasped in a historical context, following the times and places.

Mainstream Protest Reporting in the Contemporary Media Environment: Exploring (In)Stability and Adherence to Protest Paradigm From 1998 to 2017

This study uses content analysis of protest coverage and sourcing practices by five major U.S. daily newspapers over the past two decades (1998–2017) to examine the prevalence and evolution of a set of devices of representation present in news coverage of protest groups. They have been traditionally ascribed to a pattern of mainstream coverage deemed marginalizing of protest groups, the “protest paradigm.” The study concludes that the prevalence of marginalizing devices is stable over time, and that the degree of adherence to the paradigm in news stories systematically varies across protest type and geography. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Review of &lt;em&gt;Reflections on Old Order German Sects in Berks County: Past, Present and Future&lt;/em&gt;—Owen Reitenauer, et al. (eds.)

Berks County with its diamond-shaped area of 864 square miles located in southeastern Pennsylvania is rich in history and scenic resources. Its mild climate, fertile soil, and the Schuylkill River attracted European settlers in the beginning of the eighteenth century. Looking at a map of the county and reading the names of towns such as Hamburg, Womelsdorf, Rehrersburg, and New Berlinville, the German origin of these immigrants is easy to identify. In fact, Berks County is known as part of Pennsylvania Dutch Country, with Mennonites having settled this land as early as 1717. The county is also home to the first known Amish congregation in America, established sometime between 1736-38 along Tulpehocken Creek, and to numerous other Old Order Germans, less “plain” Moravians, Mennonites, and mainstream Protestant Pennsylvania Germans. These German immigrants have put their stamp on all facets of religious, economic, and cultural life of the area, creating a rich heritage and diversity of denominations that is explored by the eleven contributors of the book entitled &lt;em&gt;Reflections on Old Order German Sects in Berks County&lt;/em&gt;. [First paragraph]

A Comparative Analysis of the Pragmatic Functions of “Amen” in Mainstream Protestant and Pentecostal Churches in Cameroon

One of the words that all Christians agree upon is ‘Amen’. Although many do not know its exact meaning, as informal observations have shown, there is tacit consensus over one of its functions, namely Gospel truth marker. Over the years and following the various developments in the Christian faith, the word has acquired new functions according to the obedience. This paper sets out to investigate the pragmatic functions of ‘Amen’ as used in two different religious trends, namely mainstream Protestant Churches and Pentecostal Churches. The data were collected in one prototypical parish of each trend through participant observation, tape-recording, and field note. Basically, one church service from each trend was randomly selected and transcribed. The analysis of the data revealed that each trend seems to assign different functions to ‘Amen’. In fact, while mainstream Protestant Churches have kept its traditional conclusion and Gospel truth marker illocutionary force, New-Born Churches add to these the phatic communion and power marker among others. The stakes are both communicative and political since the quality of the service, in terms of faithful involvement, may influence the future of both religious trends in the country. This communicative influence spills over the political one as these new functions are slowly but steadily making their way into some traditional churches in the country.

Using Radical Environmentalist Texts to Uncover Network Structure and Network Features

Radical social movements are broadly engaged in, and dedicated to, promoting change in their social environment. In their corresponding efforts to call attention to various causes, communicate with like-minded groups, and mobilize support for their activities, radical social movements also produce an enormous amount of text. These texts, like radical social movements themselves, are often (i) densely connected and (ii) highly variable in advocated protest activities. Given a corpus of radical social movement texts, can one uncover the underlying network structure of the radical activist groups involved in this movement? If so, can one then also identify which groups (and which subnetworks) are more prone to radical versus mainstream protest activities? Using a large corpus of British radical environmentalist texts (1992–2003), we seek to answer these questions through a novel integration of network discovery and unsupervised topic modeling. In doing so, we apply classic network descriptives (e.g., centrality measures) and more modern statistical models (e.g., exponential random graph models) to carefully parse apart these questions. Our findings provide a number of revealing insights into the networks and nature of radical environmentalists and their texts.

Strategic Support and Electoral Expectations: Did Voters Choose Brexit and Corbyn Because They Expected Them to Lose?

Recent UK elections have seen apparently unexpected levels of support for the Leave side in the EU referendum and the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn. Some commentators have argued that these surprising results were not driven by actual support for these outcomes, but by voters who did not expect their choice to win. It is claimed that voters chose these options strategically either to influence the winner's policies or to minimise the scale of the victory of their opposing side, while still preferring the side they voted against to actually win. We refer to this proposed mechanism as mainstream protest voting. We use data from the British Election Study Internet Panel to examine the evidence for such behaviour. In both the EU referendum and 2017 General Election we find no evidence that mainstream protest voting was an important factor in voters' support for either Leave or Corbyn.

Queer contestation of neoliberal and heteronormative moral geographies during #occupygezi

During the summer of 2013, Turkey witnessed the largest protest movement in the history of the republic. The protests began with environmentalist concerns to save a public park in central Istanbul, Gezi Park, from becoming a shopping mall. However, in a matter of days, the protests turned into a reaction against what many protestors perceived to be the authoritarian rule of the prime minister at the time. While the mainstream protest discourses focused on reacting against such perceptions, which produced sexist and heterosexist discourses, queer discourses were centered on celebrating coexistence and diversity through resistance. Drawing on literatures of queer theory that focus on queer space and moral geography, this article builds on Foucault’s notion of heterotopic space. Using queer linguistics to investigate blog posts that were written at the time of the protest by queer individuals who were taking part in protest, this article investigates the ways in which queer discourses construct the moral geography of the Gezi Park and at the same time challenge neoliberal and heteronormative moral geographies.

Don’t Play Ball with South Africa: The United States, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, and the Davis Cup Protests

By the mid-1970s, South Africa’s sporting teams had been banned from international competition by nearly every governing sporting body due to the nation’s apartheid policies. Yet, South Africa remained eligible to play in the Davis Cup, the prestigious international team tennis tournament. Thus, tennis became one of the last frontiers in the global sport boycott, a critical component of the transnational anti-apartheid struggle. At the same time, apartheid had moved from an issue on the fringe of American society at the beginning of the decade to an increasingly mainstream and influential protest movement taking place in various arenas across the United States, from labour unions to churches to college and university campuses. This article examines the efforts of Richard Lapchick, the American Coordinating Committee for Equality in Sport and Society (ACCESS), and other activists in the United States to force the International Tennis Federation (ITF) to ban South Africa and its athletes from competition in the Davis Cup. It explores the place of sport in the struggle against apartheid in the United States at the end of the 1970s.

Европейские христианские церкви и уровень их влияния

The article evaluates the level of influence of the Christian Churches in the European Union. In order to identify this influence, the author considers such variables as the degree of the religiosity of the state and the presence of Churches at the supranational (EU) level. Using the parameters of religiosity - belief in God, belonging to a particular denomination, and the confidence in the Church - the author identifies areas of high, medium and low influence of the Churches in the EU. The area of high influence includes Cyprus, Greece, Malta, Romania, Italy, Croatia and Poland; the medium influence area includes Germany, Spain, Finland, Ireland, Slovenia, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, Luxembourg, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Lithuania and Austria; and the low influence area - Estonia, the Czech Republic, France, the UK, Belgium, Latvia and the Netherlands. Only countries with the homogenous Catholic or Orthodox population are inside the area of the high influence, while the countries with multi-confessional population are mainly in the area of low influence. This is partly due to the historical circumstances, but also to the rivalry between denominations, their ability to work together, and peculiarities of social doctrines. The author believes that all Christian denominations, with the exception of some Free Churches, show readiness to cooperate with the EU institutions on a variety of issues, which is confirmed by the growing number of religious representations in Brussels, where the Catholic Church has managed to establish the most influential and professional bodies, followed by the Orthodox and then by the mainstream Protestants. However, European institutions do not show the same degree of openness and eagerness to interact with the Christian Churches as the latter express about interacting with the EU.

Theonome Reciprocity as Key for Interpreting the Phenomenon of Declining Numbers in Protestant Mainstream Churches – A South African Study

Theonome Reciprocity as Key for Interpreting the Phenomenon of Declining Numbers in Protestant Mainstream Churches – A South African Study

Theonome Reciprocity as Key for Interpreting the Phenomenon of Declining Numbers in Protestant Mainstream Churches – A South African Study

Theonome Reciprocity as Key for Interpreting the Phenomenon of Declining Numbers in Protestant Mainstream Churches – A South African Study

Religious experience and religious motivation among Catholic and mainstream Protestant churchgoers in Australia: testing and applying five short measures

ABSTRACTThe present study draws on two sets of theories developed within the psychology of religion (concerning religious experience and religious motivation) to test three six-item measures of religious orientation (intrinsic, extrinsic, and quest) and to develop two seven-item measures of religious experience (mystical and charismatic) among Catholic (N = 626) and Mainstream Protestant (N = 505) churchgoers participating in the 2011 Australian National Church Life Survey. The data demonstrated satisfactory levels of internal consistency reliability for all five scales. The mean scale scores revealed higher levels of intrinsic religiosity among Mainstream Protestants and higher levels of extrinsic religiosity among Catholics; but little variation between the two groups in terms of quest religious orientation, mystical orientation, or charismatic orientation.

Sin and Salvation in Reformation England ed. by Jonathan Willis

Reviewed by: Sin and Salvation in Reformation England ed. by Jonathan Willis Debora Shuger Sin and Salvation in Reformation England. Edited by Jonathan Willis. [St Andrews Studies in Reformation History.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2015. Pp. xii, 282. $124.95. ISBN 978-1-4724-3736-5. This collection of fourteen essays, the introduction explains, explores the reconfigurations of sin and salvation attendant upon the English Reformation. Moreover, unlike much recent scholarship, which foregrounds the material and marginal, it focuses on the “theological mainstream” (p. 11) yet, in contrast to older studies, expands its field of vision beyond “elite theological discourses” to consider the “social and communal process[es]” of theological change (p. 3). [End Page 613] This is a laudable project, but problems surface early on. The introduction itself seems unsure as to the character of the Protestant mainstream: was there a Calvinist consensus, the godly being merely “hotter” Protestants, or was Calvinism a single current within a mainstream that included various theologies of sin and salvation? The introduction seems to favor the second option, yet, as Alexandra Walsham’s learned and generous afterword notes, the essays by and large assume the Calvinist-consensus model. Indeed, they often seem to assume that the official formularies of the English Church were Calvinist, which, if one is trying to understand lay piety, seems a rather fundamental mistake.1 A second and deeper problem runs through the entire volume: namely, a failure to grasp the distinctive Protestant conception of sin. The introduction offers what looks like almost a tautological definition—sin being that which endangers salvation (p. 6)—but then what is one to make of the entry in the immensely successful Puritan book of devotions, Crumms of Comfort (1623), significantly titled “A Godly Prayer,” which includes the following self-description: I am prone and apt to all badness, dull and heavy to all goodness; my thoughts wicked, my deeds damnable, my life impious, my sayings deceitful, my heart hollow. I say one thing and do another; I run from sin to sin, from drunkenness to lust, from lust to greater sins, from one bad deed to another, from one ill thought to another. A medieval Catholic might have thought this an ungodly prayer. However, for Protestants—Lutheran as well as Reformed—an acute sense of sin becomes inseparable from Christian inwardness because the Reformation’s Law/Gospel dialectic requires one to feel oneself as a sinner, desperately in need of grace, of salvation. To gain assurance of one’s election, the pre-eminent late-Elizabethan Calvinist William Perkins writes in A Golden Chain (1591), one should examine one’s life for evidence of sanctification, such as, he continues, “I. To feel our wants, & in the bitterness of heart, to bewail the offence of God in every sin. II. To strive against the flesh; that is, to resist & hate the ungodly motions thereof, & with grief to think them burthenous & troublesome.” Sin endangers salvation, but a deep sense of personal sinfulness identifies the saints. It is the godly who groan under the burden of guilt, while the reprobates whoop it up in the alehouse. Since, however, good Christians do not, as a rule, commit barn-door sins (murder, theft, perjury, etc.), they can only feel this guilt, and the terror of God’s avenging justice by what one essay elegantly calls “the exponential multiplication of offences” (p. 81). For the godly theologian in Dent’s best-selling Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven (1602), to say “rats” when a brick falls on his toe makes an idol of the rat and thus violates the Third Commandment.2 [End Page 614] None of the essays grasps this imbrication of sin and salvation. The footnotes suggest the reason, for these—excepting a single omnibus note in the introduction—consistently fail to cite the magisterial scholarship of the late twentieth century on Tudor-Stuart theology: Patrick Collinson’s Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley, 1967) and Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982), Peter Lake’s Moderate Puritans (New York, 1982) and Anglicans and Puritans (Boston, 1988), Nicholas Tyacke’s Anti-Calvinists (New York, 1987), R. T. Kendall’s Calvin and English Calvinism (Oxford, 1979), John Bossy’s Peace in the...

Faith, Loyalty, and the Limits of Neutrality in the Crisis of the Union

Faith, Loyalty, and the Limits of Neutrality in the Crisis of the Union April Holm (bio) Timothy L. Wesley. The Politics of Faith during the Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. xi + 273 pp. Notes and index. $45.00. Just as Abraham Lincoln famously asserted that slavery was “somehow” the cause of the Civil War, historians of nineteenth-century American religion have reached a consensus that religion, particularly evangelical Protestantism, is somehow essential to a complete understanding of the conflict. The exact mechanism of that “somehow,” however, remains difficult to define. Over the past twenty years, historians have taken on the challenge of formulating a satisfying and complete account of the connection between the pervasive religiosity of the nineteenth-century United States and the great political and military upheaval of the era. Historians agree upon the centrality of evangelical Protestantism to nineteenth-century American culture.1 Americans North and South interpreted the traumas of war and its aftermath through this evangelical Protestant lens. The Civil War era saw a religious people using their faith to make sense of an all-consuming military, political, and interpersonal struggle. As George Rable writes in his recent synthesis, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples, “many people on both sides of the conflict turned to religious faith to help explain the war’s causes, course, and consequences.”2 Both Northerners and Southerners, Rable argues, saw Providence at work in the drama of secession, the ordeals of the battlefield, and the revolution of emancipation. Still, many questions about the war and religion remain unresolved. Historians of religion and the Civil War grapple with two categories of questions. One category seeks to identify the role religion played in the war itself, from secession to emancipation: did religion affect secular events? A second line of inquiry asks how the war affected American religion: did secular events fundamentally alter the American relationship with the divine? A subset of this latter line of inquiry concerns how the war affected the lives of people of faith—specifically clergy, active church members, and the denominations to [End Page 655] which they belonged. Timothy Wesley takes up these problems in his thought-provoking and ambitious volume, The Politics of Faith during the Civil War. Wesley begins with the observation that antebellum clergy could influence millions. Preachers, he writes, were “the most politically determinative force within affiliated American Christianity, the only members of the greater church family who exercised significant yet immediate authority over others” (p. 42). Patriotic civilians, church leadership, and secular authorities recognized this powerful potential influence. Consequently, ministers acquired heightened political significance during the Civil War. Observers from all three groups monitored clergy to ensure loyalty to the Union. They expected and enforced patriotic messages from the pulpit. Wesley argues that the narrative of a monolithically pro-war and pro-Union Northern clergy has obscured the number of ministers in the North who strongly opposed such “political preaching.” Supporting his argument with evidence from church records, religious periodicals, and military documents, Wesley draws three conclusions: that white Northern ministers did not uniformly support the government; that, nevertheless, the boundary between church and state was much more porous in the Civil War era than historians currently assume it was; and finally, that the censure of nonpolitical preachers constitutes an important untold part of the story of civil liberties in the era. The book is a welcome contribution to the growing body of work on religion during the crisis of the union. Wesley draws attention to an overlooked point of conflict between religion, politics, and church and state in American history. His work prompts instructive new ways of thinking about civil liberties, loyalty, and the divide between the moral and the political in the fraught atmosphere of the Civil War North. The Politics of Faith during the Civil War is structured both chronologically and thematically. Wesley begins with a discussion of the familiar political events of the 1850s and concludes with the end of the Civil War. The first two-thirds of the volume primarily concern white Northern clergy and their struggles over religion and politics in the time of war. Wesley admirably includes clergy from outside the evangelical Protestant mainstream...

Robert Persons’s Resolution(1582) and the issue of textual piracy in Protestant editions of Catholic devotional literature

Despite current attention to continuing crypto-Catholics in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, less attention has been paid to the extent to which Catholic culture may have affected the Protestant mainstream. This study demonstrates the general neglect of this subject, and examines the role played, then and now, by the attack of Robert Persons SJ on Edmund Bunny, a Church of England minister, for publishing a Protestant adaptation of Persons’s work. This study argues that Bunny had a more serious intent than the ‘piracy’ he is widely credited with, and that his editorial practices resembled those employed by Roman Catholics, including Persons himself. While more serious cases of textual piracy have been largely overlooked, conventional condemnation of Bunny’s edition has done little more than contribute to a general misunderstanding of (and a paucity of interest in) the reception of Catholic literature in whatever format by Protestants.

The Godless Congress of 1938: Christian Fears About Communism in Great Britain*

In September 1938, the World Union of Freethinkers held a conference in London. Fascistant Protestants and many Catholic intellectuals and clerics called the event the “Godless Congress,” and they viewed it as a part of a communist attack on Christianity in Britain and wanted it to be banned. Mainstream Protestants were also provoked by the conference, but most believed that the congress provided Christianity with an opportunity to re‐assert itself. These varied but substantial reactions show that many Christians were ready and able to defend publicly their Christian faith against what they saw as atheistic communism.