Standing Against the Whirlwind is a history of the Evangelical party in the Episcopal Church in nineteenth-century America. A surprising revisionist account of the church's first century, it reveals the extent to which evangelical Episcopalians helped to shape the piety, identity, theology, and mission of the church. Using the life and career of one of the party's greatest leaders, Charles Pettit McIlvaine, the second bishop of Ohio, Diana Butler blends institutional history with biography to explore the vicissitudes and tribulations of evangelicals in a church that often seemed inhospitable to their version of the Gospel. This gracefully written narrative history of a neglected movement sheds light on evangelical religion within a particular denomination and broadens the interpretation of nineteenth-century American evangelicalism as a whole. In addition, it elucidates such wider cultural and religious issues as the meaning of millennialism and the nature of the crisis over slavery.

This wide-ranging collection explores the complex relationships between religious sects and contemporary Western society and examines the controversial social, political, and religious issues that arise as sects seek to pursue a way of life at variance with that of other people. Wilson argues that sects, often subject to negative theological and moral judgements, can be understood only as social entities and as such require a scientifically neutral and unbiased approach to explore their emergence and persistence. He traces the growth and expansion of various movements--including the Unification Church, the Scientologists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the Exclusive Brethren--relating them to their social context, and indicates the sections of society from which their support is likely to come.

Evangelicalism is one of the strongest religious traditions in America today; 20 million Americans identify themselves with the evangelical movement. Given the modern pluralistic world we live in, why is evangelicalism so popular?
Based on a national telephone survey and more than three hundred personal interviews with evangelicals and other churchgoing Protestants, this study provides a detailed analysis of the commitments, beliefs, concerns, and practices of this thriving group. Examining how evangelicals interact with and attempt to influence secular society, this book argues that traditional, orthodox evangelicalism endures not despite, but precisely because of, the challenges and structures of our modern pluralistic environment. This work also looks beyond evangelicalism to explore more broadly the problems of traditional religious belief and practice in the modern world.
With its impressive empirical evidence, innovative theory, and substantive conclusions, "American Evangelicalism" will provoke lively debate over the state of religious practice in contemporary America.

Exploring the surprising presence of Christian Science in American literature at the turn of the 20th century, L. Ashley Squires reveals the rich and complex connections between religion and literature in American culture. Mary Baker Eddy's Church of Christ, Scientist was one of the fastest growing and most controversial religious movements in the United States, and it is no accident that its influence touched the lives and work of many American writers, including Frances Hodgson Burnett, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, and Mark Twain. Squires focuses on personal stories of sickness and healing-whether supportive or deeply critical of Christian Science's recommendations -penned in a moment when the struggle between religion and science framed debates about how the United States was to become a modern nation. As outsized personalities and outlandish rhetoric took to the stage, Squires examines how the poorly understood Christian Science movement contributed to popular narratives about how to heal the nation and advance the cause of human progress.

Did God call the Church to be an institution? The Reformation gave Europe national churches, but these came to disappoint enthusiastic believers as lacking commitment. Was the right exit policy simply to join 'free' presbyterian or congregational-type churches, as found say in America? By the 1820s, the more strategic thinkers felt not. Some followed Newman into Catholicism: other pre-charismatics advocate an ongoing apostolate that would recapture prophetic gifts: J N Darby was led to the fierce conclusion that all churches, as man-made institutions, were bound to fail. The believer's true hope was the return of Jesus Christ. With others, Darby pioneered a less formal association of believers, free of clergy and founded on radical holiness. Darby was a tireless traveler, talented linguist and Bible translator. His influence is still felt in systematic theology, missionary societies, para- and house-church movements, possibly even in US foreign policy towards the state of Israel.

"Rumspringa "is Tom Shachtman's celebrated look at a littleknown Amish coming-of-age ritual, the "rumspringa--"the period of "running around" that begins for their youth at age sixteen. During this time, Amish youth are allowed to live outside the bounds of their faith, experimenting with alcohol, premarital sex, revealing clothes, telephones, drugs, and wild parties. By allowing such broad freedoms, their parents hope they will learn enough to help them make the most important decision of their lives--whether to be baptized as Christians, join the church, and forever give up worldly ways, or to remain in the world.
In this searching book, Shachtman draws on his skills as a documentarian to capture young people on the cusp of a fateful decision, and to give us "one of the most absorbing books ever written about the Plain People" ("Publishers Weekly").

Baptists are the second-largest religious group in the United States, trailing only Catholics. They represent nearly 20% of the US population and a third of all American Protestants, and have attained a certain level of notoriety for their penchant for controversy. From their defiance of established churches in the Colonial period, to pastor Robert Jeffress calling Mitt Romney's Mormonism a "cult" during the Republican primaries of 2012 they have consistently been at the forefront of religion's collision with culture and society. This book will offer a history of Baptists in America from the Colonial period to the present day, from their fight for the separation of church and state to their role as some of the chief combatants in today's culture wars. Their history has been marked by internal battles and schisms that were microcosms of national events, from the conflict over slavery that divided North from South to the ascendancy of conservatives within the Southern Baptist Convention, which mirrored developments within the Republican Party. The book's primary theme will be Baptists' struggles between seeing themselves as "insiders" or "outsiders" in American culture. The persecuted Baptists of the colonial period became one of the dominant churches in nineteenth-century America. Today, they are the primary spokespersons for evangelical America. Yet, even as they appear comfortable in this role, Baptists have never been sure if America represented a Babylon of spiritual exile, or a peaceful Zion. This book will offer a lively and accessible history of one of America's most important religious groups.

American evangelicalism often appears as a politically monolithic, textbook red-state fundamentalism that elected George W. Bush, opposes gay marriage, abortion, and evolution, and promotes apathy about global warming. Prominent public figures hold forth on these topics, speaking with great authority for millions of followers. Authors Stephens and Giberson, with roots in the evangelical tradition, argue that this popular impression understates the diversity within evangelicalism an often insular world where serious disagreements are invisible to secular and religiously liberal media consumers. Yet, in the face of this diversity, why do so many people follow leaders with dubious credentials when they have other options? Why do tens of millions of Americans prefer to get their science from Ken Ham, founder of the creationist Answers in Genesis, who has no scientific expertise, rather than from his fellow evangelical Francis Collins, current Director of the National Institutes of Health?

Exploring intellectual authority within evangelicalism, the authors reveal how America s populist ideals, anti-intellectualism, and religious free market, along with the concept of anointing being chosen by God to speak for him like the biblical prophets established a conservative evangelical leadership isolated from the world of secular arts and sciences.

Today, charismatic and media-savvy creationists, historians, psychologists, and biblical exegetes continue to receive more funding and airtime than their more qualified counterparts. Though a growing minority of evangelicals engage with contemporary scholarship, the community s authority structure still encourages the anointed to assume positions of leadership.

Is Bethany Baptist Academy God's choice? Ask the fundamentalist Christians who teach there or whose children attend the academy, and their answer will be a yes as unequivocal as their claim that the Bible is God's inerrant, absolute word. Is this truth or arrogance?
In "God's Choice," Alan Peshkin offers readers the opportunity to consider this question in depth. Given the outsider's rare chance to observe such a school firsthand, Peshkin spent eighteen months studying Bethany's high school--interviewing students, parents, and educators, living in the home of Bethany Baptist Church members, and participating fully in the church's activities. From this intimate research he has fashioned a rich account of Christian schooling and an informed analysis of a clear alternative to public education.

When Joseph Smith ran for president as a radical protest candidate in 1844, Mormons were a deeply distrusted group in American society, and their efforts to enter public life were met with derision. When Mitt Romney ran for president as a Republican in 2008 and 2012, the public had come to regard Mormons as consummate Americans: patriotic, family-oriented, and conservative. How did this shift occur? In this collection, prominent scholars of Mormonism, including Claudia L. Bushman, Richard Lyman Bushman, Jan Shipps, and Philip L. Barlow, follow the religion's quest for legitimacy in the United States and its intersection with American politics. From Brigham Young's skirmishes with the federal government over polygamy to the Mormon involvement in California's Proposition 8, contributors combine sociology, political science, race and gender studies, and popular culture to track Mormonism's rapid integration into American life. The book takes a broad view of the religion's history, considering its treatment of women and African Americans and its portrayal in popular culture and the media. With essays from both Mormon and non-Mormon scholars, this anthology tells a big-picture story of a small sect that became a major player in American politics.

Inward Baptism analyses the theological developments that led to the great evangelical revivals of the mid-eighteenth century. Baird Tipson here demonstrates how the rationale for the "new birth," the characteristic and indispensable evangelical experience, developed slowly but inevitably from Luther's critique of late medieval Christianity. Addressing the great indulgence campaigns of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Luther's perspective on sacramental baptism, as well as the confrontation between Lutheran and Reformed theologians who fastened on to different aspects of Luther's teaching, Tipson sheds light on how these disparate historical moments collectively created space for evangelicalism. This leads to an exploration of the theology of the leaders of the Evangelical awakening in the British Isles, George Whitefield and John Wesley, who insisted that by preaching the immediate revelation of the Holy Spirit during the "new birth," they were recovering an essential element of primitive Christianity that had been forgotten over the centuries. Ultimately, Inward Baptism examines how these shifts in religious thought made possible a commitment to an inward baptism and consequently, the evangelical experience.

Late one night in 1823 Joseph Smith, Jr., was reportedly visited in his family's farmhouse in upstate New York by an angel named Moroni. According to Smith, Moroni told him of a buried stack of gold plates that were inscribed with a history of the Americas' ancient peoples, and which would restore the pure Gospel message as Jesus had delivered it to them. Thus began the unlikely career of the "Book of Mormon," the founding text of the Mormon religion, and perhaps the most important sacred text ever to originate in the United States. Here Paul Gutjahr traces the life of this book as it has formed and fractured different strains of Mormonism and transformed religious expression around the world.

Gutjahr looks at how the "Book of Mormon" emerged from the burned-over district of upstate New York, where revivalist preachers, missionaries, and spiritual entrepreneurs of every stripe vied for the loyalty of settlers desperate to scratch a living from the land. He examines how a book that has long been the subject of ridicule--Mark Twain called it "chloroform in print"--has more than 150 million copies in print in more than a hundred languages worldwide. Gutjahr shows how Smith's influential book launched one of the fastest growing new religions on the planet, and has featured in everything from comic books and action figures to feature-length films and an award-winning Broadway musical.

The astonishing growth of Christianity in the global South over the course of the twentieth century has sparked an equally rapid growth in studies of ''World Christianity, '' which have dismantled the notion that Christianity is a Western religion. What, then, are we to make of the waves of Western missionaries who have, for centuries, been evangelizing in the global South? Were they merely, as many have argued, agents of imperialism out to impose Western values? In An Unpredictable Gospel, Jay Case examines the efforts of American evangelical missionaries in light of this new scholarship. He argues that if they were agents of imperialism, they were poor ones. Western missionaries had a dismal record of converting non-Westerners to Christianity. The ministries that were most successful were those that empowered the local population and adapted to local cultures. In fact, influence often flowed the other way, with missionaries serving as conduits for ideas that shaped American evangelicalism. Case traces these currents and sheds new light on the relationship between Western and non-Western Christianities.

In 1878, Elder Joseph Standing traveled into the Appalachian mountains of North Georgia, seeking converts for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Sixteen months later, he was dead, murdered by a group of twelve men. The church refused to bury the missionary in Georgia soil; instead, he was laid to rest in Salt Lake City beneath a monument that declared, "There is no law in Georgia for the Mormons." Most accounts of this event have linked Standing's murder to the virulent nineteenth-century anti-Mormonism that also took the life of prophet Joseph Smith and to an enduring southern tradition of extralegal violence. In these writings, the stories of the men who took Standing's life are largely ignored, and they are treated as significant only as vigilantes who escaped justice. Historian Mary Ella Engel adopts a different approach, arguing that the mob violence against Standing was a local event, best understood at the local level. Her examination of Standing's murder carefully situates it in the disquiet created by missionaries' successes in the North Georgia community. As Georgia converts typically abandoned the state for Mormon colonies in the West, a disquiet situated within a wider narrative of post-Reconstruction Mormon outmigration to colonies in the West. In this rich context, the murder reveals the complex social relationships that linked North Georgians-families, kin, neighbors, and coreligionists-and illuminates how mob violence attempted to resolve the psychological dissonance and gender anxieties created by Mormon missionaries. In laying bare the bonds linking Georgia converts to the mob, Engel reveals Standing's murder as more than simply mountain lawlessness or religious persecution. Rather, the murder responds to the challenges posed by the separation of converts from their loved ones, especially the separation of women and their dependents from heads of households.

Current facts about Mormonism *Over 11 million members. *Over 60,000 full-time missionaries---more than any other single missionary-sending organization in the world. *More than 310,000 converts annually. *As many as eighty percent of converts come from Protestant backgrounds. (In Mormon circles, the saying is, We baptize a Baptist church every week. ) *Within fifteen years, the numbers of missionaries and converts will roughly double. *Within eighty years, with adherents exceeding 267 million, Mormonism could become the first world-religion to arise since Islam. You may know the statistics. What you probably don t know are the advances the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) is making in apologetics and academic respectability. With superb training, Mormon scholars outclass many of their opponents. Arguments against Mormon claims are increasingly refuted as outdated, misinformed, or poorly argued. The New Mormon Challenge is a response to the burgeoning challenge of scholarly Mormon apologetics. Written by a team of respected Christian scholars, it is free of caricature, sensationalism, and diatribe. The respectful tone and responsible, rigorous, yet readable scholarship set this book in a class of its own. The New Mormon Challenge recycles no previous material and duplicates no one s efforts. Instead, responding to the best LDS scholarship, it offers freshly researched and well-documented rebuttals of Mormon truth claims. Most of the chapter topics have never been addressed, and the criticisms and arguments are almost entirely new. But The New Mormon Challenge does not merely challenge Mormon beliefs; it offers the LDS Church and her members ways to move forward. The New Mormon Challenge will help you understand the intellectual appeal of Mormonism, and it will reveal many of the fundamental weaknesses of the Mormon worldview. Whether you are sharing the gospel with Mormons or are investigating Mormonism for yourself, this book will help you accurately understand Mormonism and see the superiority of the historic Christian faith. Outstanding scholarship and sound methodology make this an ideal textbook. The biblical, historical, scientific, philosophical, and theological discussions are fascinating and will appeal to Christians and Mormons alike. Exemplifying Christian scholarship at its best, The New Mormon Challenge pioneers a new genre of literature on Mormonism. The Editors Francis J. Beckwith (Ph.D., Fordham University), Carl Mosser (Ph.D. candidate, University of St. Andrews), and Paul Owen (Ph.D., University of Edinburgh) are respected authorities on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the authors of various books and significant articles on Mormonism. Their individual biographies as well as information on the book s contributors appear inside. With contributors including such respected scholars as Craig L. Blomberg, William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, and others, The New Mormon Challenge is, as Richard Mouw states in his foreword, an important event for both Protestant evangelicals and Mormons that models to the evangelical community what it is like to engage in respectful and meaningful exploration of a viewpoint with which we disagree on key points. In recent years, Mormon scholars have produced a body of literature that has been largely ignored by evangelicals. This current volume takes a giant step forward in correcting this oversight in a way that is both intellectually vigorous, yet respectful. ---Ken Mulholland, President, Salt Lake Theological Seminary Intellectually serious evangelical responses to the faith of the Latter-day Saints have been depressingly rare. This book represents a significant contribution to a conversation that, really, has just begun. ---Daniel Peterson, Brigham Young University; Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) Finally we have a book from evangelicals in which the authors have made"

The five-volume Oxford History of Dissenting Protestant Traditions series is governed by a motif of migration ('out-of-England'). It first traces organized church traditions that arose in England as Dissenters distanced themselves from a state church defined by diocesan episcopacy, the Book of Common Prayer, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and royal supremacy, but then follows those traditions as they spread beyond England -and also traces newer traditions that emerged downstream in other parts of the world from earlier forms of Dissent. Secondly, it does the same for the doctrines, church practices, stances toward state and society, attitudes toward Scripture, and characteristic patterns of organization that also originated in earlier English Dissent, but that have often defined a trajectory of influence independent ecclesiastical organizations. The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume II charts the development of protestant Dissent between the passing of the Toleration Act (1689) and the repealing of the Test and Corporation Acts (1828). The long eighteenth century was a period in which Dissenters slowly moved from a position of being a persecuted minority to achieving a degree of acceptance and, eventually, full political rights. The first part of the volume considers the history of various dissenting traditions inside England. There are separate chapters devoted to Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists and Quakers-the denominations that traced their history before this period-and also to Methodists, who emerged as one of the denominations of 'New Dissent' during the eighteenth century. The second part explores that ways in which these traditions developed outside England. It considers the complexities of being a Dissenter in Wales and Ireland, where the state church was Episcopalian, as well as in Scotland, where it was Presbyterian. It also looks at the development of Dissent across the Atlantic, where the relationship between church and state was rather looser. Part three is devoted to revivalist movements and their impact, with a particular emphasis on the importance of missionary societies for spreading protestant Christianity from the late eighteenth century onwards. The fourth part looks at Dissenters' relationship to the British state and their involvement in the campaigns to abolish the slave trade. The final part discusses how Dissenters lived: the theology they developed and their attitudes towards scripture; the importance of both sermons and singing; their involvement in education and print culture and the ways in which they expressed their faith materially through their buildings.

Nobody knows what to do about queer Mormons. The institutional Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints prefers to pretend they don't exist, that they can choose their way out of who they are, leave, or at least stay quiet in a community that has no place for them. Even queer Mormons don't know what to do about queer Mormons. Their lived experience is shrouded by a doctrine in which heteronormative marriage is non-negotiable and gender is unchangeable. For women, trans Mormons, and Mormons of other marginalized genders, this invisibility is compounded by social norms which elevate (implicitly white) cisgender male voices above those of everyone else. This collection of essays gives voice to queer Mormons. The authors who share their stories-many speaking for the first time from the closet-do so here in simple narrative prose. They talk about their identities, their experiences, their relationships, their heartbreaks, their beliefs, and the challenges they face. Some stay in the church, some do not, some are in constant battles with themselves and the people around them as they make agonizing decisions about love and faith and community. Their stories bravely convey what it means to be queer, Mormon, and marginalized-what it means to have no voice and yet to speak anyway.

The official journal of the Brigham Young pioneer company is made available for the first time in this book. The arrival of Latter-day Saints in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake is one of the major events in the history of the LDS church and the West. Thomas Bullock, the author of this account, was the official journal keeper of that party of pioneers.Bullock was the "Clerk of the Camp of Israel," an English scribe who is perhaps more responsible than any other person for the vast documentary record of the LDS church in the the mid-nineteenth century. Though he wrote thousands of pages ultimately released under other men's names, he remains a relatively obscure figure in Western History. An intensely personal document, Bullock's account rises above its status as the "official" journal. He shares his doubts, his complaints, his personal assessments of his fellow travelers throughout the pages of the journal. This remarkable record presents in detail the daily reality of a journey that has become an American legend. From Nauvoo to Salt Lake and back to the Missouri River, Bullock's journals from September 1846 to October 1847 paint a colorful and personal picture of both the Mormon Trail and the suffering of the poverty-stricken Saints during their struggle across Iowa in 1846. They tell the legendary tale of Brigham Young's pioneer company-the beginning of a great exodus across the Plains and Rockies to the Great Basin Kingdom. Life at Winter Quarters, the renowned "miracle of the Quail" at the Poor Camp on the Mississippi River, detailed accounts of buffalo hunts, dances and celebrations, and other trail events are recorded. Jim Bridger's famous meeting with Brigham Young and other leaders of the pioneer party was described in detail by Bullock. Bridger's comments on the Valley of the Great Salt Lake, the Indians, agriculture and the West in general show the breadth of knowledge of mountain men like Bridger. The interview also gives evidence of the unanswered questions still plaguing the Saints as they neared their destination. With maps, illustrations, bibliography and index, this work is a major contribution to the history of overland migration, the LDS church, and the wider West. The book provides insight into the impressions of a devout European immigrant of the great American West. An appendix containing biographical data on Mormon pioneers is included.