All who profess history as a way of knowing and making a living are acutely aware that we live in an anti-historical Youthful radicals and their most vigorous opponents appear as opposite sides of a coin; both engage in historical myth making which manifests a common abhorrence for the uncertainty, ambiguity, and conflict which are the fruits of the historical consciousness. Worse, some of our most respectable scholars seek to correct the situation with a pseudohistorical realism which mocks human purpose and contemporary man's efforts to master his destiny. have always rejected such fatalism and ignored the supposed demands of an impersonal and inexorable history. Instead, they have continually manufactured for themselves new and hopeful histories to underpin their truly religious faith in the nation, its ideals, and its mission. This American aversion to a history which seeks to confine men's hopes to the obviously possible and to debunk their deepest yearnings and aspirations has considerable significance for contemporary Christians. In The Search for a Usable Future, Martin Marty contends that men act in the light of futures which they envision or project, futures whose raw materials are things remembered, the usable past. If Marty is right, perhaps what American religion in generalAmerican religious historiography in particular-needs is less a revision of the record than a rebirth of vision. A usable past makes sense only in relation to a desirable future; both require a rending of past and future, of what has been and what should be.1 They require specifically a truly critical view of America; this, in turn, demands recognition of the extent to which many of the most cherished notions of American Christians rest on unexamined assumptions about America itself. Whatever the merit of these assumptions and of the American civil religion which they define, American Christians are going to have to deal with their problems within the American framework which continues to shape their awareness and response long after they believe they have come of age. While the past itself has been almost entirely an old-world possession, Henry Steele Commager writes, Americans have resolutely studied themselves as if they were an isolated chapter in history and exempt from the processes of history.2 From the very beginning America was somehow beyond the history