Review: \u27Religion in America Since 1945: A History\u27

Anyone who has taught a course in U.S. religious history knows the daunting challenge of adequately dealing with the riotous diversity of religion in America. This challenge moves from daunting to nearly overwhelming when one gets to the years after World War II. But now comes along Patrick Allitt, professor of history at Emory University, who, in Religion in America Since 1945, has managed to create out of this apparent chaos a lucid, compelling narrative of recent U.S. religious history. Of course, and as Allitt observes in his introduction, in order to “prevent the book from taking the form of a mere list or set of encyclopedia entries” he is forced to give only passing attention to “vast areas of American religious history” (p. xiii). Readers will be thankful that the author chose to be selective, as the result is a coherent, graceful account. It thus may be the worst sort of academic quibbling to suggest that the book could have benefited from more attention to mainline Protestantism (how the writing of American religious history has changed!), peace churches, and Native religion. But it is not quibbling to lament that there is almost nothing here on Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement (the latter does not even appear in the index), given that, as Grant Wacker and others have made clear, this may be the most important religious movement of the twentieth century

Fundamentalism

In America fundamentalism is a movement within Protestantism that was organized immediately after World War I in opposition to modernism, which included liberal theology primarily, and also Darwinism and secularism. A subgroup of evangelicalism, fundamentalism staunchly affirmed with evangelicals fundamentals of the faith, including the deity of Christ, his virgin birth, his bodily resurrection, and his substitutionary atonement. What distinguishes fundamentalists from other evangelicals is their strident opposition to modernism. They are, to quote George Marsden, militant anti-modernist evangelicals

Review: \u27What Would Jesus Read? Popular Religious Books and Everyday Life in Twentieth-Century America\u27

In this interesting book Erin Smith analyzes popular religious books since the late nineteenth century with an eye toward understanding why – despite the scorn heaped on them by intellectuals -- they have been so beloved by their readers. Rather than being a comprehensive survey, What Would Jesus Read? consists of five case studies: the Social Gospel novels (1880s-1910s), Bruce Barton’s The Man Nobody Knows (1925), post-World War II religious self-help books, Hal Lindsay’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), and books for “the seeker” from the past twenty-five years. Smith’s focus is on white Protestant readers; working against the overworked liberal-conservative binary, she argues that these readers, who are “believed to be at opposite ends of the religious and political spectrum,” actually “share a culture of religious reading” (302) in which what really matters is “if these texts worked – that is, made them better people, managed their fears and anxieties, and made them feel as if their lives mattered” (7)

Faith, History, and the Conference on Faith and History

The author notes of this paper, given as a keynote address: The talk that I give tonight is not the talk that I was originally planning to deliver at this conference. When I was asked to give the keynote address, I assumed that I would simply present an elongated version of the paper that I was going to give in this morning\u27s session on Peace, Justice, and Evangelicals ; my paper was to be on the strengths and weaknesses and omissions in the recent literature written by evangelicals on the notion of a Christian approach to history. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I needed to do more than this. Presidential addresses have not been a custom in this organization — and after tonight you may conclude that not having presidents speak was a very good tradition indeed — and it gradually became apparent to me that I really needed to take this opportunity to say something about the past, present, and future of this organization. While the original title, \u27The Whole Gospel for a Broken World\u27: Evangelicals and the Writing of History, would in some sense still work — I have a fair amount to say about Christian perspectives in the writing of history — the better title is, indeed, Faith, History, and the Conference on Faith and History

Review: \u27God Hates: Westboro Baptist Church, American Nationalism, and the Religious Right\u27

America is Doomed. God Hates Obama. Fags Doom Nations. Thank God for Dead Soldiers. All these are signs held up at military funerals by members of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas. In God Hates sociologist Rebecca Barrett-Fox gives us the first full-scale examination of Westboro, and it makes for fascinating and horrifying reading. She begins her study with an ethnography of the church, including a biography of founding pastor Fred Phelps, that makes use of interviews with church members to delineate Westboro’s hyper-Calvinist theology and its understanding of the connection between individual sin (particularly, homosexuality) and national tragedy (particularly, the death of soldiers), a point that the church seeks to bring home with its picketing. ... God Hates is a disturbing book, more for what it says about the Religious Right than for it what it says about Westboro Baptist. It is worth reading

Review: \u27The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century\u27

Laubach’s story—in its emphasis on the spiritual benefits of reading, mysticism, and interfaith encounters— serves as the perfect coda to Hedstrom’s terrific study of religious liberalism in twentieth-century America. The Rise of Liberal Religion joins an expanding corpus of work—most notably Gary Dorrien’s three-volume The Making of American Liberal Theology (2001, 2003, 2006) and Leigh Eric Schmidt’s Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality from Emerson to Oprah (2005)—that provides balance to the substantive scholarly attention recently given to conservative Protestantism. This scholarship suggests—and The Rise of Liberal Religion is explicit in this regard—that there is much more to the story of religious liberalism in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America than the numerical decline of mainline Protestant churches

Response: Are American Christians Persecuted?

With an eye toward reuniting the church and the academy, this book focuses on the role that scholarship can play in making good preachers into really great preachers. This is the bridge between scholarly and popular writing that informs the sermon and makes it more powerful and meaningful for the people who regularly listen to sermons. Preachers are challenged to raise the level of their commitment to scholarship as well as overcome any pre-existing prejudices with scholarship. The preacher as scholar is the perfect way for the pulpit to respond to the challenges of a secular, post-modern world that often wonders if smart people can even believe in God

In Lockdown America: The Corruption of Capital Punishment

Reviews of three books: Randolph Loney, A Dream of the Tattered Man: Stories from Georgia’s Death Row. Austin Sarat, When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition. Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America. Author\u27s introduction: I finish this review in the shadow of Timothy McVeigh\u27s execution. But while America\u27s most notorious mass murderer is dead, and while the pundits continue to argue the merits and meaning of his execution, news about capital punishment just keeps coming. Next after McVeigh on the federal death list is Juan Raul Garza, but because of the dramatic racial and geographic disparities in federal death sentences, religious and civil rights leaders are using Garza\u27s case — he is a Mexican-American convicted in Texas — to press for a moratorium on federal executions. Recently the Supreme Court overturned the death sentences of Texans Mark Robertson and Johnny Paul Penry, the latter on the grounds that his jury should have received better instructions on how it should take into account his mental retardation and frightful childhood. And here in Ohio, the state prepares to execute Jay D. Scott, even as his attorneys continue to argue in various courts that to kill a schizophrenic is cruel and unusual punishment ; Scott\u27s execution has been delayed twice, the last time five minutes before the poison was to be administered — the shunts were already in his veins

Protestantism and Fundamentalism

The term fundamentalism has been used to describe a host of religious movements across the globe that are militantly antimodernist, aggressively patriarchal, literalist in their reading of sacred texts, and assiduous in their efforts to draw boundaries between themselves and outsiders. While Islamic fundamentalism has received the most attention, particularly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, scholars and journalists have also applied the term to movements within such disparate traditions as Judaism, Sikhism, and Hinduism, as well as to various Christian groups. There are benefits to understanding fundamentalism as a global movement that grows out of deep-seated and intense opposition to (aspects of) modernity, and that is found in a wide array of religious traditions. Among other things, such an approach allows for interesting and often insightful comparative analysis. But there are problems with defining fundamentalism generically and applying it globally. Not only does such an approach not lend itself to definitional precision, it can devolve into derogatory shorthand for reactionary religious groups. As a result, and for the purposes of this chapter, it is best to understand fundamentalism where it started, as a religious movement within Protestantism. Fundamentalism had its origins in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Anglo-American evangelicalism, and it blossomed into a full-fledged religious movement in the years immediately after World War I (see Brereton, 1990: 165-70; Carpenter, 1997: 3-12). To a great degree fundamentalism has been an American phenomenon, with its origins and greatest strength in the United States, although it has had a limited presence in Canada (although, as George Marsden has observed, it has often been successfully propagated overseas by its vigorous missions ). While there are a multitude of evangelical connections between the United States and the remainder of the Anglo-American world, for a variety of reasons — including a greater commitment to established churches and to ecumenism — the fundamentalist movement never had the impact in England or even in Canada that it had in the USA

Reports from Fundamentalism’s Front Lines: ‘The Pilot’ and Its Correspondents, 1920-1947

Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America explores how a variety of print media—religious tracts, newsletters, cartoons, pamphlets, self-help books, mass-market paperbacks, and editions of the Bible from the King James Version to contemporary Bible-zines —have shaped and been shaped by experiences of faith since the Civil War. Edited by Charles L. Cohen and Paul S. Boyer, whose comprehensive historical essays provide a broad overview to the topic, this book is the first on the history of religious print culture in modern America and a well-timed entry into the increasingly prominent contemporary debate over the role of religion in American public life