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Orthodox Christians in America
by John H. Erickson
Oxford Univ. Press
141 pp.; $22
African-American Religion
by Albert Raboteau
Oxford Univ. Press
142 pp.; $22
Harry S. Stout and Jon Butler, the American religion team at Yale University, have lined up an impressive roster of scholars to write books for their new series, Religion in American Life, projected to include 17 volumes when complete. Claudia and Richard Bushman are writing a book on Mormons, Randall Balmer on religion in twentieth-century America, Ann Braude on women and American religion, and Mark Noll on American Protestants, to name only a few of the distinguished historians who have agreed to contribute to the series.
These scholars are trying to do what most academics only talk about: reach beyond the walls of the ivory tower to a general audience—in this case, tenth graders, high schoolers more generally, and even the occasional adult reader, not to mention grad students cramming for comps. Expectations for the series are high: Oxford has demonstrated a commitment to such projects before, producing outstanding secondary school textbooks on American women's history and African American history.
Among the first volumes to appear are Albert Raboteau's on African Americans and John Erickson's on the Eastern Orthodox. Both manage to translate scholarship into a young people's lingua franca without compromising their intellectual integrity. Both try to show connections between religion and larger historical questions—immigration, slavery, urban development.
Most readers will come to Erickson's book with a virtually blank slate regarding Orthodoxy in early America, but a few may recall hearing of missionary activity and settlements on the Pacific Rim. For those readers, Erickson has a surprise in store: the story of an Orthodox settlement in Revolutionary-era Florida. Carrying the narrative forward, he introduces readers to indigenous Alaskans who adopted Orthodoxy, investigates the impact of the Russian Revolution on the North American diocese of the Russian Orthodox church, and examines Orthodox participation at Selma.
Of course, the civil-rights struggle plays a large role in Raboteau's study. In his chapter on the movement, Raboteau makes clear that "black churches were more political and black protest movements more religious than critics admitted." Indeed, this theme runs throughout his narrative, as Raboteau rehearses the relationship between black churches and abolitionism, explaining how "Practicing religion itself could be … an act of resistance" for slaves.
Unfortunately, the books contain only a handful of primary sources. Stout and Butler might have taken Freedom's Unfinished Revolution as their model. A high-school textbook about the Civil War and Reconstruction written by the American Social History Project, Freedom's Unfinished Revolution includes not only dozens of provocative primary sources but also suggested activities that incorporate the sources in order to teach kids not only about what happened in a given place, but also how to be historians. Some of the primary sources included in the Religion in American Life books are curious, especially given that there are so few. One of four documents included in African-American Religion is an excerpt from Ida B. Wells's antilynching appeal to President McKinley. Lynching is certainly a key issue in postbellum African American history, but the connections between religion and lynching are subtle, not immediately obvious to most doctoral candidates in U.S. history, never mind schoolchildren. Raboteau makes no effort to explicate the relevance of this document to religion.
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