Protestants have been the dominant religious group since the colonial period, and they remain a vibrant and influential cultural force in the United States. But the term "Protestant" encompasses people with a vast range of beliefs, backgrounds, politics, and experiences, and this books provides an accessible introduction to this complex situation. The Protestant Experience in America lays out the history of Protestants in America, the core beliefs and common practices that they mostly share, the major events and controversies, and long-term trends for the future of Protestants in the United States. Even for those Americans intimately familiar with Protestant life and faith, The Protestant Expereince in America will give readers a new perspective on this important cultural influence in American life: BLProvides a concise overview of the core beliefs and common practices of most Protestants BLIntroduces the major events and controversies of the history of the Protestant faith in America BLIdentifies long term trends in Protestant life BLDiscusses the major figures in the history of Protestantism, from Jonathan Edwards to Martin Luther King, and how they impacted the daily life of Protestants

In this groundbreaking work, Amanda Porterfield explores the long intertwining of religion and commerce in the history of incorporation in the United States. Beginning with the antecedents of that history in western Europe, she focuses on organizations to show how corporate strategies in religion and commerce developed symbiotically, and how religion has influenced the corporate structuring and commercial orientation of American society. Porterfield begins her story in ancient Rome. She traces the development of corporate organization through medieval Europe and Elizabethan England and then to colonial North America, where organizational practices derived from religion infiltrated commerce, and commerce led to political independence. Left more to their own devices than under British law, religious groups in the United States experienced unprecedented autonomy that facilitated new forms of communal governance and new means of broadcasting their messages. As commercial enterprise expanded, religious organizations grew apace, helping many Americans absorb the shocks of economic turbulence, and promoting new conceptions of faith, spirit, and will power that contributed to business. Porterfield highlights the role that American religious institutions played a society increasingly dominated by commercial incorporation and free market ideologies. She also shows how charitable impulses long nurtured by religion continued to stimulate reform and demand for accountability.

Business is an understudied area in American religious history that has profound implications for how we understand the popularity and ongoing transformation of religion in the US. This volume explores the business aspects of American religious organizations by analyzing the financing, production, marketing, and distribution of religious goods and services and the role of wealth and economic organization in sustaining and even shaping worship, charity, philanthropy, institutional growth and missionary work. Treating religion and business holistically, the essays show how business practices have continually informed American religious life. Laying important groundwork for further investigation, the essays show how American business has operated as a domain for achieving religious purpose that historians of religion often overlook. Even when critics denounce its corruption and fallen state, business occupies a central place in American religious life that merits better understanding. Historically, religion has been more powerful in America when interwoven with business. Chapters on Mormon enterprise, Jewish philanthropy, Hindu gurus, Native American casinos, and the wedding of business wealth to conservative Catholic social teaching indicate the range of new studies stimulated by the business turn in American religious history. Other essays show how evangelicals joined neo-liberal economic practice and right-wing politics to religious fundamentalism to consolidate wealth and power, and develop marketing campaigns and organizational strategies that transformed the broader parameters of American religious life. All these essays stimulate new ways of thinking about American religious history, and about American success. Some essays in this volume expose the moral compromises religious organizations have made to succeed as centers of wealth and influence, and the religious beliefs that rationalize and justify these compromises. Other essays dwell on the application of business practices as a means of sustaining religious institutions and expanding their reach. Still others take account of controversy over business practices within religious organizations, and the adjustments religious organizations have made in response. Together, the essays collected here offer various ways of conceptualizing the interdependence of religion and business in the U.S., establishing multiple paths for further study of their intertwined historical development.

Healing is one of the most constant themes in the long and sprawling history of Christianity. Jesus himself performed many miracles of healing. In the second century, St. Ignatius was the first to describe the eucharist as the medicine of immortality. Prudentius, a 4th-century poet and Christian apologist, celebrated the healing power of St. Cyprian's tongue. Bokenham, in his 15th-century Legendary, reported the healing power of milk from St. Agatha's breasts. Zulu prophets in 19th-century Natal petitioned Jesus to cure diseases caused by restless spirits. And Mary Baker Eddy invoked the Science of Divine Mind as a weapon against malicious animal magnetism. In this book Amanda Porterfield demonstrates that healing has played a major role in the historical development of Christianity as a world religion. Porterfield traces the origin of Christian healing and maps its transformations in the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds. She shows that Christian healing had its genesis in Judean beliefs that sickness and suffering were linked to sin and evil, and that health and healing stemmed from repentance and divine forgiveness. Examining Jesus' activities as a healer and exorcist, she shows how his followers carried his combat against sin and evil and his compassion for suffering into new and very different cultural environments, from the ancient Mediterranean to modern America and beyond. She explores the interplay between Christian healing and medical practice from ancient times up to the present, looks at recent discoveries about religion's biological effects, and considers what these findings mean in light of ages-old traditions about belief and healing. Changing Christian ideas ofhealing, Porterfield shows, are a window into broader changes in religious authority, church structure, and ideas about sanctity, history, resurrection, and the kingdom of God. Her study allows us to see more clearly than ever before that healing has always been and remains central to the Christian vision of sin and redemption, suffering and bodily resurrection.

Americans have long acknowledged a deep connection between evangelical religion and democracy in the early days of the republic. This is a widely accepted narrative that is maintained as a matter of fact and tradition - and in spite of evangelicalism's more authoritarian and reactionary aspects. In Conceived in Doubt, Amanda Porterfield challenges this standard interpretation of evangelicalism's relation to democracy and describes the intertwined relationship between religion and partisan politics that emerged in the formative era of the early republic. In the 1790s, religious doubt became common in the young republic as the culture shifted from mere skepticism toward darker expressions of suspicion and fear. But by the end of that decade, Porterfield shows, economic instability, disruption of traditional forms of community, rampant ambition, and greed for land worked to undermine heady optimism about American political and religious independence. Evangelicals managed and manipulated doubt, reaching out to disenfranchised citizens as well as to those seeking political influence, blaming religious skeptics for immorality and social distress, and demanding affirmation of biblical authority as the foundation of the new American national identity. Porterfield demolishes the idea that evangelical growth in the early republic was the cheerful product of enthusiasm for democracy, and she creates for us a very different narrative of influence and ideals in the young republic.

American women played in important part in Protestant foreign missionary work from its early days at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This work allowed them to disseminate the Prostestant religious principles in which they believed, and by enabling them to acquire professional competence as teachers, to break into public life and create new opportunities for themselves and other women. No institution was more closely associated with women missionaries than Mount Holyoke College. In this book, Amanda Porterfield examines Mount Holyoke founder Mary Lyon and the missionary women she trained. Her students assembled in a number of particular mission fields, most importantly Persia, India, Ceylon, Hawaii, and Africa. Porterfield focuses on three sites where documentation about their activities is especially rich-- northwest Persia, Maharashtra in western India, and Natal in southeast Africa. All three of these sites figured importantly in antebellum missionary strategy; missionaries envisioned their converts launching the conquest of Islam from Persia, overturning "Satan's seat" in India, and drawing the African descendants of Ham into the fold of Christendom. Porterfield shows that although their primary goal of converting large numbers of women to Protestant Christianity remained elusive, antebellum missionary women promoted female literacy everywhere they went, along with belief in the superiority and scientific validity of Protestant orthodoxy, the necessity of monogamy and the importance of marital affection, and concern for the well-being of children and women. In this way, the missionary women contributed to cultural change in many parts of the world, and to the development ofnew cultures that combined missionary concepts with traditional ideals.

Business is an understudied area in American religious history that has profound implications for how we understand the popularity and ongoing transformation of religion in the US. This volume explores the business aspects of American religious organizations by analyzing the financing, production, marketing, and distribution of religious goods and services and the role of wealth and economic organization in sustaining and even shaping worship, charity, philanthropy, institutional growth and missionary work. Treating religion and business holistically, the essays show how business practices have continually informed American religious life. Laying important groundwork for further investigation, the essays show how American business has operated as a domain for achieving religious purpose that historians of religion often overlook. Even when critics denounce its corruption and fallen state, business occupies a central place in American religious life that merits better understanding. Historically, religion has been more powerful in America when interwoven with business. Chapters on Mormon enterprise, Jewish philanthropy, Hindu gurus, Native American casinos, and the wedding of business wealth to conservative Catholic social teaching indicate the range of new studies stimulated by the business turn in American religious history. Other essays show how evangelicals joined neo-liberal economic practice and right-wing politics to religious fundamentalism to consolidate wealth and power, and develop marketing campaigns and organizational strategies that transformed the broader parameters of American religious life. All these essays stimulate new ways of thinking about American religious history, and about American success. Some essays in this volume expose the moral compromises religious organizations have made to succeed as centers of wealth and influence, and the religious beliefs that rationalize and justify these compromises. Other essays dwell on the application of business practices as a means of sustaining religious institutions and expanding their reach. Still others take account of controversy over business practices within religious organizations, and the adjustments religious organizations have made in response. Together, the essays collected here offer various ways of conceptualizing the interdependence of religion and business in the U.S., establishing multiple paths for further study of their intertwined historical development.

Amanda Porterfield offers a survey of ideas, rituals, and experiences of healing in Christian history. Jesus himself performed many miracles of healing, and Christians down the ages have seen this as a prominent feature of their faith. Indeed, healing is one of the most constant themes in the long and sprawling history of Christianity. Changes in healing beliefs and practices offer a window into changes in religious authority, church structure, and ideas about sanctity, history, resurrection, and the kingdom of God. Porterfield chronicles these changes, at the same time shedding important new light on the universality of religious healing. Finally, she looks at recent scientific findings about religion's biological effects, and considers the relation of these findings to ages-old traditions about belief and healing.

A synthesis of literary critical and historical methods, Porterfield's book combines insightful analysis of Puritan theological writings with detailed examinations of historical records showing the changing patterns of church membership and domestic life. She finds that by conflating marriage as a trope of grace with marriage as a social construct, Puritan ministers invested relationships between husbands and wives with religious meaning. Images of female piety represented the humility that Puritans believed led all Christians to self-control and, ultimately, to love. But while images of female piety were important for men primarily as aids to controlling aggression and ambition, they were primarily attractive to women as aids to exercising indirect influence over men and obtaining public recognition and status.

The first intensive, close-up investigation of the practice and teaching of religion at American colleges and universities, "Religion on Campus" is an indispensable resource for all who want to understand what religion really means to today's undergraduates.

To explore firsthand how college students understand, practice, and learn about religion, the authors visited four very different U.S. campuses: a Roman Catholic university in the East, a state university in the West, a historically black university in the South, and a Lutheran liberal arts college in the North. They interviewed students, faculty members, and administrators; attended classes; participated in worship services; observed prayer and Bible study groups; and surveyed the general ethos of each campus. The resulting study makes fascinating and important reading for anyone--including students, parents, teachers, administrators, clergy, and scholars--concerned with the future of young Americans.

Challenging theories of the secularization of higher education and the decline of religion on campus, this book reveals that both the practice and the study of religion are thriving, nourished by a campus culture of diversity, tolerance, and choice.

The Power of Religion is an engaging introduction to six religious traditions--Native American religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism--which recognizes the diversity of religious belief and offers both comparative and historical analysis. Genuinely accessible to undergraduates and general readers, it shows how various forms of these traditions are lived out in practice, experience, and community, presenting religions as conceivable ways of living and demonstrating how religious beliefs are integrally related to other aspects of life. Many chapters open with a description of a particular religious event or act that one might encounter today in the United States, where virtually all of the world's religions are now being practiced. The author discusses several of the historical developments each religion has undergone and considers how each of the religions has changed in response to the climate of religious exchange and religious pluralism that exists in the United States today. The Power of Religion helps readers to understand the vitality and plausibility of religious belief, to draw comparisons between religions, and to reflect on the nature of religion and its role in society. It is ideal for courses in introduction to religion, world religions, and comparative religion, and will also appeal to general readers interested in religion.