The Columbia Guide to Religion in American History

The bulk of The Columbia Guide to Religion in American History consists of twenty brief essays on a variety of topics of current interest in American religious history, each written by a noted expert on the topic. The majority of the essays are either of the “American religion and ... ” type (nationalism, politics, law, war, gender and sexuality, race, ethnicity, the environment, popular culture, conservatism and fundamentalism) or focused on particular groups or traditions (Native American religion, Evangelicals, Asian American religions, New Religious Movements, Catholicism, Judaism, Mormonism, Islam), whereas two outliers cover “Colonial Encounters” and the development of Christian theology in the United States. According to the preface, each of the essays was intended to include a narrative overview of the topic, a review of the historiography, a statement of the current scholarly consensus (if such exists), and suggestions for further research accompanied with an up-to-date bibliography (p. xiii). Most, but not all, of the essays conform to this format, and where they do, they provide excellent models for graduate students preparing for qualifying exams or as resources for scholars in the field wishing to bring themselves quickly up to speed on a specific topic. Anthony Michael Petro's “Religion, Gender, and Sexuality” and Margaret Bendroth's “Religious Conservatism and Fundamentalism,” to point out but two of the best, seamlessly integrate historical narrative with the historiographic development of the field to create elegant, fully orbed essays that cover both aspects quite well in remarkably few pages. Others are less successful in this specific regard, choosing to focus either on historical narrative (e.g., Mark Noll's “Theology”) or historiography (e.g., Philip Goff's “Religion and Popular Culture”). Despite this lack of consistency, all of the essays in the volume are nevertheless readable, accurate, and evenhanded, although D. Michael Quinn's “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (“Mormons”)” is marked by the slightly polemical edge that is characteristic of his work. Finally, the one topic that was not included in this work that I would have expected given its current relevance is American religion and science.

Conservatism · Fundamentalism · Historiography · History of religions · Human sexuality · Literature · Narrative · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Mormonism, Religion, and History · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religious studies