Christian History Home > 2002 > Tell Me a Story
Tell Me a Story
The most helpful church history scholarship is both broad and narrative.
Reviewed by Elesha Coffman | posted 8/08/2008 12:33PM
 2 of 2
Williams wants to argue that developments in religion grow organically from sociological shifts, but the way he writes about these developments gives readers the sense that they all spring from nowhere. Whatever merit his argument holds, it does not tell a story.
Noll, on the other hand, has a story. Granted, he set himself a much narrower assignment than did Williams. The Old Religion is even narrower than the text to which it will most likely be compared, Noll's A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada. With an audience of "curious students and lay readers" in mind, Noll sets out "to highlight aspects of North American Christianity that set it apart from patterns of religious experience and organization more common in historic European Christendom." In other words, Noll wants to describe how Christianity has affected America, and how America has affected Christianity.
Noll never professes to tell more than one story among many, but observers outside the incessantly pluralistic culture of academia could easily determine that Noll has isolated the big story of American religious history. As of 2000, according to Gallup, 85 percent of Americans considered themselves Christians, while adherents of all non-Christian religions combined accounted for only 5 percent of the population. Some 75 percent of Americans claim European heritage, and while that percentage is falling, white Europeans have (for good and ill) played by far the largest role in the nation's history. To assert this is not to say that no one else matters, but that the transmission and adaptation of European forms of Christianity has mattered more, to more Americans, than any other religious force. This is our central narrative.
Even with a central narrative, though, Noll's book remains inclusive in important ways. He usefully compares the United States with Canada and Mexico, and he considers pluralism, divisions, and fragmentation significant-and not altogether negative-aspects of American Christianity. His narrative has room for Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox believers, blacks and whites (as well as other ethnicities), conservatives and liberals, clergy and laypeople, gains and losses. Still, the narrative hangs together, like the motto says: "Out of many, one."
Obviously, I have tipped my hand here. I am more compelled by Noll's narrative than by Williams' sweeping survey. Of course, if I sought information on the American Jewish community, a serious look at Unitarianism, or even more than a handful of pages on Anabaptists, I would find America's Religions a helpful resource. I just wouldn't make any attempt to read the whole thing.
Our partner store, http://www.Christianbook.com/, carries The Old Religion in a New World but features only an older edition of America's Religions. http://www.Amazon.com/ has the new one.
Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today International/Christian History magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Christian History.
Browse More ChristianHistory.net
Home | Browse by Topic | Browse by Period | The Past in the Present | Books & Resources
| |
|
share this page
