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The Problem of the History of Religion in America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Sydney E. Ahlstrom
Sydney E. Ahlstrom
Affiliation:
Mr. Ahlstrom is professor of church history and American history inYale University, and presently is chairman of the American Studies Program
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Extract

Half a year before this paper was read before a plenary session of the American Academy of Religion (26 October 1969), the program committee had requested an essay dealing in some comprehensive way with the field of American religious history. Because I would in any case have to be thinking about the introduction to my own “religious history of the American people,” I agreed.The title was sufficiently broad; and goodness knows the problems of this subject area are sufficiently large.1 Aside from innumerable large and small questions of fact there are the countless questions of emphasis and interpretation, not to mention the problem of discerning an overarching theme. I also confess great sympathy with Max Lerner's comment on the ten years he spent on America as a Civilization (1957). “I found when I came to the end of the decade,” he said, “that a number of things I had written about America were no longer valid. The American civilization had been changing drastically right under my fingertips as I was writing about it.”2 The present-day historian's predicament is, if anything, more difficult than Lerner's in that the sixties, by contrast with the fifties, have experienced a veritable earthquake of revisionism which has profoundly altered our interpretation of the entire course of American history. By reason of its screaming moral dilemmas, moreover, the decade had an especially rude impact on long accepted views of religious history. But enough of this: let us consider the substantive questions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , June 1970 , pp. 224 - 235
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1970

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References

1. I have also dealt with some of these problems in two other more fully annotated essays: “The Radical Turn in Theology and Ethics: Why It Occurred in the 1960's,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 387 (01, 1970)Google Scholar; “The Moral and Theological Revolution of the Sixties and Its Implications for American Religious Historiography,” in Herbert Bass (ed.), The State of American History (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970).Google Scholar

2. Ford, Thomas R. (ed.), The Revolutionary Theme in Contemporary America (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965), p. 1.Google Scholar

3. History of the American Episcopal Church, 1600–1915, 11th ed. (Milwaukee: Morehouse Publishing Co., 1916), pp. xvii–xix.Google Scholar

4. Cf. Haller, William, The Elect Nation (New York. Harper & Row, 1967)Google Scholar; Miller, Perry, “From Covenant to Revival,” in Nature's Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tuveson, Ernest Lee, Redeemer Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).Google Scholar

5. Strong, Josiah, The New Era: or the Coming Kingdom (New York, 1893), pp. 41–80, esp. p. 80.Google Scholar

6. Hector, J.de Crèvecoeur, St. John, Letters from an American Farmer, and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America, ed. Stone, Albert E., (New York: Signet Classics, 1963).Google Scholar

7. Schaff, Philip made heavy use of Baird in his own America (New York, 1855)Google Scholar, to which we have already alluded. Though his book did not figure strongly in the developing historiographical tradition, Schaff himself (along with his Mercersberg colleague, J. W. Nevin) probably did more during his long lifetime to establish the “historical standpoint” in the American mind than any other church historian. See Nichols, James H., Romantic Theology in America (Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 1961).Google Scholar

8. My merely passing mention of these several luminaries of American religious historiography should be sufficient evidence that this essay is not intended to be an historiographical survey, much as such a work is needed.

9. “The Recovery of American Religious History,” American Historical Review, 70 (10, 1964), 79–92.Google Scholar

10. In discussions following the reading of this paper and in subsequent correspondence so many issues pertaining to civil religion were raised that only another essay could deal with them. I mean chiefly that the piety which informed Independence and Memorial Day ceremonies during their heyday as well as the “American Religion” which Will Herberg discerned as basic to the religious “upswing” of the fifties (Protestant Catholic Jew, 1955, chap. V.) is fast losing its hold. (See note 4 above.)