In this book, twelve historians examine the nature of the American Protestant establishment and its response to the growing pluralism of this century. The authors conclude that the period surveyed forms a distinct epoch in the evolution of American Protestantism. The days when Protestant cultural authority could be taken for granted were over, but a new era in which religious pluralism would be widely accepted had not yet arrived.

Conventional wisdom holds that tradition and history meant little to nineteenth-century American Protestants, who relied on common sense and "the Bible alone." The Old Faith in a New Nation challenges this portrayal by recovering evangelical engagement with the Christian past. Even when they appeared to be most scornful toward tradition, most optimistic and forward-looking, and most confident in their grasp of the Bible, evangelicals found themselves returning, time and again, to Christian history. They studied religious historiography, reinterpreted the history of the church, and argued over its implications for the present. Between the Revolution and the Civil War, American Protestants were deeply interested in the meaning of the Christian past. Paul J. Gutacker draws from hundreds of print sources-sermons, books, speeches, legal arguments, political petitions, and more-to show how ordinary educated Americans remembered and used Christian history. While claiming to rely on the Bible alone, antebellum Protestants frequently turned to the Christian past on questions of import: how should the government relate to religion? Could Catholic immigrants become true Americans? What opportunities and rights should be available to women? To African Americans? Protestants across denominations answered these questions not only with the Bible but also with history. By recovering the ways in which American evangelicals remembered and used Christian history, The Old Faith in a New Nation shows how religious memory shaped the nation and interrogates the meaning of "biblicism."

The Protestant conviction that believers would rise again, in bodily form, after death, shaped their attitudes towards personal and religious identity, community, empire, progress, race, and the environment. In To Walk the Earth Again Christopher Trigg explores the political dimension of Anglo-American Protestant writing about the future resurrection of the dead, examining texts written between the seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. By reading histories, epic poetry, funeral sermons, and scientific tracts alongside works of eschatological exegesis, Trigg challenges the conventional scholarly assumption that Protestantism's rejection of purgatory prepared the way for the individualization and secularization of Western attitudes towards mortality. Puritans, Anglicans, Quakers, and radicals looked to resurrection to understand their communities' prospects in the uncertain terrain of colonial America. Their belief that political identities and religious duties did not expire with their mortal bodies but were carried over into the next life shaped their positions on a wide variety of issues, including the limits of ecclesiastical and civil power, the relationship of humanity to the natural world, and the emerging rhetoric of racial difference. In the early national and antebellum periods, secular and Christian reformers drew on the idea of resurrection to imagine how American republicanism might transform society and politics and ameliorate the human form itself. By taking early modern Protestant beliefs seriously, Trigg unfolds new perspectives on their mutually constitutive visions of earthly and resurrected existence.

Hill's landmark work in southern religious history returns to print updated and expanded - and compellingly relevant. In 1966, Samuel S. Hill's Southern Churches in Crisis argued that southern Protestantism, a cornerstone of white southern society and culture, was shirking its moral duty by refusing to join in the fight for racial justice. Hill predicted that the church was risking its standing in southern society and that it would ultimately decline in influence and power. A groundbreaking study at the time, Hill's book helped establish southern religious history as a field of scholarly inquiry. Three decades later, Southern Churches in Crisis continues to be widely read, quoted, and cited. In Southern Churches in Crisis Revisited, which reprints the 1966 text in full, Hill reexamines his earlier predictions in an introductory essay that also describes how the study of religion in the south has become a major field of scholarly inquiry. Hill skillfully engages his critics and revisers integrating new perspectives and recent scholarship. He suggests new areas for exploration and provides a selected bibliography of key studies in southern religious history that have been published during the last three decades. In a second essay entitled 'Thirty Years Later,' Hill contends that a new crisis has emerged. He finds that the current dilemma, unlike the externally driven crisis of the 1960s is strictly an internal affair, initiated by the churches and related to doctrinal orthodoxy. He concludes that the triumph of rational purity over 'the religion of the heart' has inaugurated an era in the South's religious life that promises to produce major changes in the storied relation of church and culture in this most visibly religious section of the United States. Southern Churches in Crisis Revisited will be of value to scholars and students interested in the author's reexamination of this powerful and influential force in Southern religion.

Providing a new, women-centered view of mainline Protestantism in the 20th century, Good and Mad explores the paradoxes and conflicting loyalties of liberal Protestant churchwomen who campaigned for human rights and global peace, worked for interracial cooperation, and opened the path to women's ordination, all while working within the confines of the church that denied them equality. Challenging the idea that change is only ever made by the loud, historian Margaret Bendroth interweaves vignettes of individual women who knew both the value of compromise and the cost of anger within a larger narrative that highlights the debts second-wave feminism owes to their efforts, even though these women would never have called themselves feminists. This lively historical account explains not just how feminism finally took root in American mainline churches, but why the change was so long in coming. Through its complex examination of the intersections of faith, gender, and anger at injustice, Good and Mad will be invaluable to anyone interested in the history of gender and religion in America.

New England theologian Jonathan Edwards came to prominence at the culmination of a dramatic paradigm shift in millennialism that had begun in the sixteenth century, declaring that a thousand-year earthly kingdom would arrive in the future. For Edwards, the land of Israel would be the ideal location of the millennial kingdom, and the people of Israel, after their restoration, would play critical and decisive roles in the millennium's commencement. Edwards's millennial vision was also cosmic, however, and included both Europe and China. Unlike his Protestant predecessors and his Puritan contemporaries, Edwards's millennialism de-centralized England and New England. Contrary to what many have argued, Edwards neither originated nor advocated the notion of the American redeemer nation. In America's Theologian Beyond America, Victor Zhu establishes the coherence of Edwards's Judeo-centric and cosmic vision of the millennial kingdom and argues that this vision is an indispensable part of Edwards's theological system. He highlights three theological loci in Edwards's millennialism: the greatness of God's divine sovereignty, the magnificence of His glory, and the capaciousness of His kingdom. Zhu demonstrates Edwards's conviction of the progressive realization of the kingdom, refuting the prevailing misinterpretation that Edwards thought the millennium was imminent. He explores Edwards's cosmic vision of the millennial kingdom, which extended from New England and Israel to China and other parts of the "heathen" world. In conclusion, Zhu examines the contemporary relevance of Edwards's millennialism in Chinese millennial movements.

During the second half of the seventeenth century the entire intellectual framework of educated Europe underwent a radical transformation. A secularized view of humanity and nature was replacing faith in the direct operation of God's will in the temporal world, while a growing confidence in human reason and the Scientific Revolution turned back the epistemological skepticism spawned by the Reformation. By focusing on the Dutch Collegiants, a radical Protestant group that flourished in Holland from 1620 to 1690, Andrew Fix explicates the mechanisms at work in this crucial intellectual transition from traditional to modern European worldview. Starting from Rijnsburg, near Leiden, the Collegiants spread over the course of the century to every major Dutch city. At the same time, their thinking evolved from a millenarian spiritualism influenced heavily by the sixteenth-century Radical Reformation to a philosophical rationalism similar to the ideas of Spinoza. Fix has taken on an important topic in the history of ideas: the circumstances under which natural reason came to be accepted as an autonomous source of truth for the individual conscience. He also has fresh and concrete things to say about the relationship between religion and science in early modern European history. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Reformed Conformity that flourished within the Early Stuart English Church was a rich, vibrant, and distinctive theological tradition that has never before been studied in its own right. While scholars have observed how Reformed Conformists clashed with Laudians and Puritans alike, no sustained academic study of their teaching on grace and their attitude to the Church has yet been undertaken, despite the centrality of these topics to Early Stuart theological controversy. This ground-breaking monograph recovers this essential strand of Early Stuart Christian identity. It examines and analyses the teachings and writings of ten prominent theologians, all of whom made significant contributions to the debates that arose within the Church of England during the reigns of James I and Charles I and all of whom combined loyalty to orthodox Reformed teaching on grace and salvation with a commitment to the established polity of the English Church. The study makes the case for the coherence of their theological vision by underlining the connections that these Reformed Conformists made between their teaching on grace and their approach to Church order and liturgy. By engaging with a robust and influential theological tradition that was neither puritan nor Laudian, Grace and Conformity significantly enriches our account of the Early Stuart Church and contributes to the ongoing scholarly reappraisal of the wider Reformed tradition. It builds on the resurgence of academic interest in British soteriological discussion, and uses that discussion, as previous studies have not, to gain valuable new insights into Early Stuart ecclesiology.

Religious rivalry and persecution have bedeviled so many societies that confessional difference often seems an unavoidable source of conflict. Sacred Boundaries challenges this assumption by examining relations between the Catholic majority and Protestant minority in seventeenth-century France as a case study of two religious groups constructing confessional difference and coexistence. The book studies bi-confessional communities and families, gender roles, confessional polemics, and conversion narratives to discuss topics that include missions, intermarriage, cemetery sharing, women's religious activities, and the meaning of conversion. Its exploration of how the religious groups found ways to live together provides an approach to studying religious rivalry in other times and places. To explain how confessional groups in this period could be peaceful as well as contentious, the book offers a new conceptualization of three ways Catholics and Protestants constructed the confessional boundary. In the first, their shared concerns for communal harmony and familial interests led them to blur confessional identities. In another, it led them to reach agreements on sharing civic spaces and institutions; such arrangements made their confessional identities clear, but each group maintained an acknowledged place in communities. And in a third form of boundary, the groups were rigidly divided; Protestants were pressured to convert as a way of reintegrating themselves into communities they shared with Catholics. Yet family members and neighbors of the two faiths found ways to over-come even this harshest of confessional boundaries. Through its examination of confessional identity and the different means of constructing the boundary between religious groups, Sacred Boundaries provides a new understanding of the enduring concerns of religious intolerance and coexistence. And because the study itself crosses boundaries - in the questions it poses, the topics it treats, and the disciplinary approaches it employs - it will interest scholars in history, religion, anthropology, sociology, women's studies, and literary studies.

The mainline Protestant churches played a vital role in the settlement of the West. Yet historians have, for the most part, bypassed this theme. This account recreates the unique religious and cultural mix that sets this region apart from the rest of the nation. From itinerant circuit riders to powerful urban bishops, western clergy were continually involved in the maturation of their communities. Their duties on the frontier extended far beyond delivering Sunday sermons; they also served as librarians, counselors, social workers, educators, booksellers, peacekeepers, and general purveyors of culture. Weaving together the varied experiences of men and women from the five major Protestant denominations - Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregational, and Episcopal - the author discusses their responses to life on the frontier: the violence, the tumultuous growth of the cities, the isolation of farm life, and the widespread hunger, especially among women, for refinement. Mexico and the author of Religion in the Modern American West and The Day the Sun Rose Twice: The Story of the Trinity Site Nuclear Explosion, July 16, 1945.

A blend of understandable explanations and real-life stories. "Why I Am a Lutheran explores the foundational teachings of the Christian church. In each chapter, Daniel Preus calls upon more than 20 years of pastoral experience to reveal Jesus as the center of the Christian faith. As he addresses central doctrines such as sin and grace, Law and Gospel, the person and work of Jesus Christ, worship, the Sacraments, and the office of the ministry, Preus keeps the focus on Jesus Christ--who is "always and only at the center of all Christian teaching."

Award of Merit, 2019 Christianity Today Book Awards (History/Biography) More than forty years ago, conservative Christianity emerged as a major force in American political life. Since then the movement has been analyzed and over-analyzed, declared triumphant and, more than once, given up for dead. But because outside observers have maintained a near-relentless focus on domestic politics, the most transformative development over the last several decades-the explosive growth of Christianity in the global south-has gone unrecognized by the wider public, even as it has transformed evangelical life, both in the US and abroad. The Kingdom of God Has No Borders offers a daring new perspective on conservative Christianity by shifting the lens to focus on the world outside US borders. Melani McAlister offers a sweeping narrative of the last fifty years of evangelical history, weaving a fascinating tale that upends much of what we know-or think we know-about American evangelicals. She takes us to the Congo in the 1960s, where Christians were enmeshed in a complicated interplay of missionary zeal, Cold War politics, racial hierarchy, and anti-colonial struggle. She shows us how evangelical efforts to convert non-Christians have placed them in direct conflict with Islam at flash points across the globe. And she examines how Christian leaders have fought to stem the tide of HIV/AIDS in Africa while at the same time supporting harsh repression of LGBTQ communities. Through these and other stories, McAlister focuses on the many ways in which looking at evangelicals abroad complicates conventional ideas about evangelicalism. We can't truly understand how conservative Christians see themselves and their place in the world unless we look beyond our shores.

In their zeal to tell the true story of sixteenth-century radicalism, some sympathizers of the Anabaptist movement have portrayed the once maligned individuals and groups as innocent, pious people who suffered cruel persecution at the hands of the wicked state-churchmen. Their side of the story is thus often as one-sided as was the story of the enemies of Anabaptism.

This book, written by a Mennonite scholar, seeks to understand the reasons for the clash between Luther and the radicals, a point often neglected when one or the other side is emphasized. The study keeps Luther, however, in a central position, exploring the issues which led to the Reformer's attitude toward the radicals and analyzing the principles that were at stake in his struggle with the dissident groups.

Inspired by the ideas of the Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius, Arminianism was the subject of important theological controversies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and still today remains an important position within Protestant thought. What became known as Arminian theology was held by people across a wide swath of geographical and ecclesial positions. This theological movement was in part a reaction to the Reformed doctrine of predestination and was founded on the assertion that God's sovereignty and human free will are compatible. More broadly, it was an attempt to articulate a holistic view of God and salvation that is grounded in Scripture and Christian tradition as well as adequate to the challenges of life. First developed in European, British, and American contexts, the movement engaged with a wide range of intellectual challenges. While standing together in their common rejection of several key planks of Reformed theology, supporters of Arminianism took varying positions on other matters. Some were broadly committed to catholic and creedal theology, while others were more open to theological revision. Some were concerned primarily with practical matters, while others were engaged in system-building as they sought to articulate and defend an over-arching vision of God and the world. The story of Arminian development is complex, yet essential for a proper understanding of the history of Protestant theology. The historical development of Arminian theology, however, is not well known. In After Arminius, Thomas H. McCall and Keith D. Stanglin offer a thorough historical introduction to Arminian theology, providing an account that will be useful to scholars and students of ecclesiastical history and modern Christian thought.

This collection of essays charts the influence of the Lutheran Reformation on various (northern) European languages and texts written in them. The central themes of Languages in the Lutheran Reformation: Textual Networks and the Spread of Ideas are: how the ideas related to Lutheranism were adapted to the new areas, new languages, and new contexts during the Reformation period in the 16th and 17th centuries; and how the Reformation affected the standardization of the languages. Networks of texts, knowledge, and authors belong to the topics of the present volume. The contributions look into language use, language culture, and translation activities during the Reformation, but also in the prelude to the Reformation as well as after it, in the early modern period. The contributors are experts in the study of their respective languages, including Czech, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, High German, Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian, Low German, Norwegian, Polish, and Swedish. The primary texts explored in the essays are Bible translations, but genres other than biblical are also discussed.

From about 1740 to 1850, evangelical Protestantism became a major cultural force in virtually all areas of America. Emerging from this religious movement was a rich vernacular literature of conversion narratives and spiritual autobiographies-writings in which believers described their own salvation in hopes of converting others. In The Self and the Sacred, Rodger M. Payne examines these neglected texts in depth, focusing particularly on what they reveal about notions of selfhood and how those notions were incorporated into Christian orthodoxy. As Payne explains, conversion narratives point to a fascinating paradox that became evident among evangelicals as they were confronted by the disruptions and discontinuities marking their culture's passage into modernity. On the one hand, these narratives asserted the traditional Christian values of humility and self-effacement-an annihilation of the self in the divine. On the other hand, they created a discourse that allowed one to embrace the modern idea of an autonomous self: only by speaking from personal experience could a convert testify to the power of God. "Despite protests to the contrary," Payne writes, "the central character of any conversion account, spiritual diary, or spiritual autobiography was the convert, not God." Using the theology of Jonathan Edwards as a key example, Payne shows how Puritan piety encouraged the development of autobiographical spiritual narratives. He goes on to explain the ways in which the discourse of conversion functioned apart from the control of the church and marked the growth of evangelicalism into "a discursive community." Finally, he considers how the language of conversion functioned as a "rhetorical space" in which believers situated themselves individually within sacred space and time before turning back to society with a renewed regard for others. Drawing throughout on the insights of such theorists as Michel Foucault and Victor Turner, Payne's penetrating analysis reveals the early conversion accounts as mythic texts through which the modern self emerged. The Author: Rodger M. Payne is associate professor of religious studies at Louisiana State University. He is editor-in-chief of The Journal of Southern Religion, an electronic publication available on the World Wide Web.

As religious leaders, ministers are often assumed to embody the faith of the institution they represent. As cultural symbols, they reflect subtle changes in society and belief-specifically people's perception of God and the evolving role of the church. For more than forty years, Douglas Alan Walrath has tracked changing patterns of belief and church participation in American society, and his research has revealed a particularly fascinating trend: portrayals of ministers in American fiction mirror changing perceptions of the Protestant church and a Protestant God.

From the novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who portrays ministers as faithful Calvinists, to the works of Herman Melville, who challenges Calvinism to its very core, Walrath considers a variety of fictional ministers, including Garrison Keillor's Lake Woebegon Lutherans and Gail Godwin's women clergy. He identifies a range of types: religious misfits, harsh Puritans, incorrigible scoundrels, secular businessmen, perpetrators of oppression, victims of belief, prudent believers, phony preachers, reactionaries, and social activists. He concludes with the modern legacy of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century images of ministers, which highlights the ongoing challenges that skepticism, secularization, and science have brought to today's religious leaders and fictional counterparts. "Displacing the Divine" offers a novel encounter with social change, giving the reader access, through the intimacy and humanity of literature, to the evolving character of an American tradition.

What does the practice of religion look like in Latin American today? In this book, which examines religious practice in three Latin American cities- Lima, Peru; Cordoba, Argentina; and Montevideo, Uruguay- Gustavo Morello reveals the influence of modernity on average citizens' cultural practices. Technological development, the dynamics of capitalism, the specialization of spheres of knowledge- all these aspects of modernity were thought to diminish the importance of religion. Yet, Morello argues, if we look at religion as ordinary Latin Americans practice it, we discover that modernity has not diminished religion, but transformed it, creating what Morello calls "enchanted modernity." In Latin America, there is more religion than secularists expect, but of a different kind than religious leaders would wish. Morello explores how urban, contemporary Latin Americans, both believers and non-believers, from different social classes and religious affiliations, experience transcendence in everyday life. Using semi-structured interviews with 254 individuals in three cities with shifting religious landscapes and different cultural histories, Morello highlights the diversity within Latin America, exploring societies that are understudied and examining a broad array of religious traditions: "nones" (agnostics, non-affiliated, atheist), Catholics, Evangelicals (including mainstream Protestants, Pentecostals, neo-Evangelicals), and other traditions (including Jews, Muslims, Mormons, African-derived traditions, and Buddhists). Morello emphasizes elements, nuances, and dynamics that have previously been overlooked and that can enrich the study of religion other non-western societies. The book seeks to contribute to a critical theory of contemporary religion- one that is not centered in the North Atlantic world and that takes seriously the voices of the Latin American people.

This analysis of four Black religious leaders--Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Joseph H. Jackson, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr.--reviews their differences and determines whether grounds for coalitional activity still exists. These leaders all clearly agreed that racism should be opposed but they vigorously disagreed on the forms the opposition should take.

Evangelical Christians in the United States today are known for their hard-line, restrictive approach to immigration and refugees. This book shows that this has not always been the case and is, in fact, a relatively new position. The history of evangelical involvement with refugees and immigrants has been overlooked in the current debate. Since the early 1960s, evangelical Christians have been integral players in US immigration and refugee policy. Motivated by biblical teachings to "welcome the stranger," they have helped tens of thousands of newcomers by acting as refugee sponsors or providing legalization assistance to undocumented immigrants. Until the 1990s, many evangelicals did not distinguish between documented and undocumented newcomers - all were to be loved and welcomed. In the last decade of the twentieth century, however, a growing anti-immigrant consensus in American society grew alongside evangelicals' political alignment with the Republican Party, leading to a rethinking of their theology. Following the GOP's lead, evangelicals increasingly emphasized the need to obey American law, which many argued undocumented immigrants failed to do. Today, the evangelical movement is more divided than ever about immigration policy. While conservative evangelicals are often immigration hard-liners, many progressive and Latinx evangelicals hope to convince their fellow evangelicals to take a more welcoming approach. The Strangers in Our Midst argues that the key to understanding evangelicals' divided approaches to immigration is to look at both their theology and their politics. Both of which have shaped how-and especially to whom-they extend their biblical values of hospitality.

Historians have debated how the clergy's support for political resistance during the American Revolution should be understood, often looking to influence outside of the clergy's tradition. This book argues, however, that the position of the patriot clergy was in continuity with a long-standing tradition of Protestant resistance. Drawing from a wide range of sources, Justifying Revolution: The American Clergy's Argument for Political Resistance, 1750-1776 answers the question of why so many American clergyman found it morally and ethically right to support resistance to British political authority by exploring the theological background and rich Protestant history available to the American clergy as they considered political resistance and wrestled with the best course of action for them and their congregations. Gary L. Steward argues that, rather than deviating from their inherited modes of thought, the clergy who supported resistance did so in ways that were consistent with their own theological tradition.

In Baring Witness, Holly Welker and thirty-six Mormon women write about devotion and love and luck, about the wonder of discovery, and about the journeys, both thorny and magical, to humor, grace, and contentment. They speak to a diversity of life experiences: what happens when one partner rejects Church teachings; marrying outside one's faith; the pain of divorce and widowhood; the horrors of spousal abuse; the hard journey from visions of an idealized marriage to the everyday truth; sexuality within Mormon marriage; how the pressure to find a husband shapes young women's actions and sense of self; and the ways Mormon belief and culture can influence second marriages and same-sex unions. The result is an unflinching look at the earthly realities of an institution central to Mormon life.