William Bradford wrote, at the beginning of his history Of Plymouth Plantation, “I must begin at the very root and rise” of the story, setting events down “in a plain style, with singular regard unto the simple truth in all things.” He intended to produce an accurate and clear account of the way the Plymouth settlers' lives unfolded. Readers after postmodernism may note with skepticism the governor's claim that his portrayal set down only the perfectly discoverable truth of the matter. Yet certain sparely depicted moments in his history lead us to accept the description “the simple truth” as the only one appropriate to his work.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, who achieved international fame for her 1852 antislavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, is best known to historians of American religious thought as a critic of New England Calvinism and its leading light, Jonathan Edwards. But in airing her frustrations with the Puritan tradition, Stowe also singled out a much earlier source of the problem: Augustine, the fifth-century bishop of Hippo. At his worst, Augustine typified for Stowe not only theological rigidity but also the obdurate refusal of the male system-builders to take women's perspectives seriously. Consequently, in the New England of the early republic, when “the theology of Augustine began to be freely discussed by every individual in society, it was the women who found it hardest to tolerate or assimilate it.” In leveling such criticism, Stowe echoed her elder sister Catharine Beecher, a prominent educator and social reformer, whose well-known writings on the role of women in the home have often overshadowed her two companion volumes of theology, in which she devotes more attention to Augustine than to any other figure. Yet for all her extended critiques of Augustinian themes, Beecher buried her most provocative rhetorical flourish, as one might conceal a dagger, in the last endnote on the last page of the second volume. Seizing upon the African context of Augustine's career as a metaphor for his deleterious influence on Christian theology, she concluded that reasonable people have a duty to resist the “African enslavement of Anglo-Saxon minds” no less than to combat the “Anglo-Saxon enslavement of African bodies.”

American pacifists first heard of Mohandas Gandhi and his struggles in South Africa and India after World War I. Although they admired his opposition to violence, they were ambivalent about non-violent resistance as a method of social change. As heirs to the Social Gospel, they feared that boycotts and civil disobedience lacked the spirit of love and goodwill that made social redemption possible. Moreover, American pacifists viewed Gandhi through their own cultural lens, a view that was often distorted by Orientalist ideas about Asia and Asians. It was only in the 1930s, when Reinhold Niebuhr and other Christian realists charged that pacifism was impotent in the face of social injustice, that they began to reassess Gandhian nonviolence. By the 1940s, they were using nonviolent direct action to protest racial discrimination and segregation, violations of civil liberties, and the nuclear arms race.

In her controversial novel, No Graven Image (1966), former missionary and best-selling evangelical author Elisabeth Elliot described the visit of a zealous missions executive, Mr. Harvey, to observe her main character, missionary Margaret Sparhawk, working among the mountain Quichua Indians in Ecuador. Harvey, a pompous sort, arrived with two cameras slung around his neck and spent most of his visit snapping photographs. When Margaret suggested it was time to leave the home of Pedro, her Quichua language informant, Harvey demurred, not yet finished with his picture taking.

Early one Canadian winter morning in 1908, a teenage girl knelt to pray, pleading with God to grant her the “baptism of the Holy Spirit.” Soon her petition was answered. Her body began to tremble, she slipped to the ground, and out of her lips escaped murmurs in unknown tongues. The next day, during Sunday services at a little pentecostal mission, the teenager again quaked on the floor while jabbering strange syllables. A parishioner was so shocked that he telephoned the girl's parents and implored them to retrieve the way-ward adolescent immediately. When the young woman learned that her mother was en route, panic engulfed her. How could she make her parents understand? Would they forbid her from worshipping with pentecostals?

The emerging fundamentalist movement made its first foray into extra-ecclesiastical politics during the League of Nations controversy of 1919–20. Both of the two main wings of fundamentalism—dispensational premillennialists and conservative Calvinists—took part in this controversy because both of them regarded the proposed League as an important, inherently religious issue. Both kinds of fundamentalists opposed the League, and both used the ratification debate to articulate their own types of Christian anti-internationalism. In the process they lent much Christian rhetoric to the political opponents of the League, the “Irreconcilables,” who were interested in exploiting it for their ostensibly purely secular critiques. Despite the fundamentalists' success in preventing League ratification, the controversy made them acutely aware of the political power and appeal of their liberal Protestant rivals. These had exerted themselves on behalf of the League, imparted their own religious complexion to the pro-League argument, and, not least, had managed officially to enlist almost all denominations to their side.

Figuring out exactly when the American missionary impulse started to wane is not an easy task. Some would say that the first nail in the coffin was Hannah Adams's 1784 Alphabetical Compendium of the Various Sects, purportedly an “impartial and comprehensive survey” of world religions. Others, looking at the millions of dollars that evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics continued to pour into the missionary effort at the end of the twentieth century, might well ask, incredulously, “What coffin?”