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American Originals: Homemade Varieties of Christianity
By Paul K. Conkin
Univ. of North Carolina Press
336 pp.; $55, hardcover; $18.95, paper
The most helpful thing about this study of six religious movements originating in America is the author's seriousness about what adherents to the movements have believed and practiced. Conkin is a veteran historian of cultural and scientific as well as religious subjects; this book is a complement to another recently published synthesis, The Uneasy Center: Reformed Christianity in Antebellum Minds (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1995), which focuses on the mainstream Protestant traditions lying behind modern Presbyterianism, Methodism, and Episcopalianism.
The six groups that Conkin gathers as "American originals" are the Restorationist churches (Disciples, Christian Church, Churches of Christ), Unitarian-Universalists, Adventists (with Jehovah's Witnesses appended), Latter-day Saints, Christian Scientists, and Pentecostals (with Holiness churches considered alongside the Pentecostals). Most of the volume is given over to the kind of lengthy, intelligent, moderately interpretative articles found in specialized encyclopedias. Engagement with critical scholarship is minimal, but Conkin offers just the sort of introductory overview that many will find useful for these groups.
Conkin's account takes much less notice of the way the American environment shaped the new religious movements than one finds in works like R. Lawrence Moore's Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (1986). But for questions like the contested status of Mary Baker Eddy among Christian Scientists (did she really call herself a second Christ?), on how Latter-day Saints take Joseph Smith's teaching on the potential of all humans to become gods and how they continue the practice of temple "endowment" that stretches back to Smith, or on the forces that have drawn some Seventh-day Adventists closer to more conventional evangelicals, this book offers—with one exception—useful information. The exception is Conkin's treatment of the Holiness and Pentecostal movements, both of which are too complex, involve too many sub-groups, and have been the subject of too much solid writing to be neatly precised with the success that Conkin achieves for the others.
—Mark Noll
War of the Black Heavens: The Battles of Western Broadcasting in the Cold War
By Michael Nelson
Foreword by Lech Walesa
Syracuse Univ. Press
277 pp., $29.95
Radio Free Europe and the Pursuit of Democracy: My War Within the Cold War
By George R. Urban
Yale Univ. Press
322 pp.; $30
When authors Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were on trial in Moscow in 1966, Soviet citizens followed the case by listening to Western radio, then swarmed around the courthouse to be part of the scene. Daniel's wife, visiting her husband in prison, used code language to let him know the West was reporting: She brought greetings from Grandmother Lillian Hellman, Uncle Bert Russell, little nephew Norman Mailer. The guard remarked what large families "you Jewish people have."
This story and others, similarly riveting, are told by Michael Nelson. He also records testimonials to the effectiveness of Western radio from Andrei Amalrik, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, Vladimir Bukovsky, any number of dissidents—and ordinary people, too. Broadcasting was among the West's best endeavors in what was always fundamentally a war of ideas. Some who didn't then, and still don't now, understand the nature of the contest have taken to saying that the Cold War never happened. Readers of Nelson and Urban will know better. These books tell a too-little-known chapter in the still-accumulating story, as long-secret archives open up, of what the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova decades ago called the "True Twentieth Century," with totalitarianism as its distinctive theme.
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