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The Religious History of America: The Heart of the American Story from Colonial Times to Today
by Edwin S. Gaustad and Leigh E. Schmidt
HarperSanFrancisco, Rev. ed., 2002
464 pp.; $29.95
If you want proof that all the scholars involved in writing these two volumes are men, look no further than the fact that they have forgotten at least one very significant anniversary. Only by an effort of will can two major religious histories of America published in 2002 have failed to note that they appear exactly three centuries after the pioneering work that invented this whole genre, Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana (1702). Three decades ago, moreover—in 1972—Sydney E. Ahlstrom published his Religious History of the American People (Yale Univ. Press), the book that taught a generation of scholars the crucial importance of moving beyond denominational boundaries to integrate religious history into the broader picture of political and social life.
Reading both the books to be discussed in this essay gives us a splendid opportunity to see how American religious history has evolved in the past generation. This process of development is all the more evident because The Religious History of America is a fully updated version of a book first published by Edwin Gaustad in 1966, and aptly described as a "modern classic." Just what have we learned in the intervening decades?
What has not changed—arguably, since Mather's time—is the realization of the central role of faith and faiths in the making of America. As Jon Butler et al. note in their beautifully written volume, "the story of religion in America therefore usually stands with the grain of American secular history, not against it." That formulation brings me up short only to the extent that I struggle with the concept of "secular history." In the American context, just what is that? Have not religious movements provided the organizing framework for most of the transforming events of American history, the social movements that bubbled forth from successive awakenings, revivals, consciousness reformations, or whatever we call them? Was abolitionism really a secular movement? Was feminism (whether in the 19th century or the 20th)? The civil rights movement? Can we hope to understand the antebellum period without taking account of concepts like millenarianism and restorationism? What about the Progressive Era, the age of the Social Gospel? Who can doubt that in studying American religion, we are dealing here with the heart of the nation's story?
Having said this, the heart looks very different than it once did. Cotton Mather told a simple story of good and evil, night and day, in which English Puritan Christianity was unquestionably in the right. His aim was to "report the wonderful displays of [God's] infinite power, wisdom, goodness, and faithfulness, wherewith His Divine Providence hath irradiated an Indian Wilderness." Later historians were less overtly triumphalist, but well into the 20th century, the Protestant story was clearly meant to be the dominant thread.
Obviously this vision has been diluted in recent scholarship, and by no means as a mere response to political correctness. To take one obvious point, an America in which the population's center of gravity is so rapidly shifting south and west inevitably has a greater appreciation of the non-Puritan, non-New England Christian traditions that have exercised such an influence in other parts of the nation. When you pass Spanish missions on the way to work, and the driver in front of you has a bumper sticker of the Virgin of Guadalupe, there is something unconvincing about the implicit claim that America's Christian culture fanned outwards from Massachusetts Bay.
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