The American Revolution is a perennial topic for historians, but despite the constant output of books on that subject, there are few good, recent books on religion in the Revolution. Good, that is, in the sense that the book is suitable for undergraduates or general readers and that the author does not have an axe to grind in the style of Glenn Beck. Two new books promise to fill that gap.

The first book is T. H. Breen’s American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People, published this May. The book is not exactly about religion. It is a history of the Revolution from 1774 to 1776, in which Breen argues that the Revolution owes at least as much to the people of the “middling sort” as it does to the founding fathers. A key part of his argument is that the “young, evangelical” colonists started an insurgency because of their religious beliefs. Evangelical, mostly Calvinist religion taught them that their natural rights as Englishmen were in fact given by God; those rights came with God’s command to  preserve them. Religion also explained the duties that monarchs had to fulfill in order to be legitimate. For most people, then, the insurgency was an “appeal to heaven”—in both a Lockean and an evangelical sense. This argument runs throughout the book, but it is particularly the theme of chapter 9, “An Appeal to Heaven: Religion and Rights.”

The second is Thomas S. Kidd’s God of Liberty: A Religious History of the Revolution. This book is still forthcoming, due out in October. Kidd is a professor at Baylor University, and the author of The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (2007). If God of Liberty is of the same quality as The Great Awakening, then it promises to become the comprehensive history of religion in the Revolution. We’ll have a review when the book comes out.

Earlier this year USA Today ran an article and an interactive infographic about a recent survey of American religion. The American Religious Identification Survey has released data about the religion affiliations of Americans, finding that most religious groups have lost adherents since 1990.

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With this post, Religion in America welcomes its first guest author. Devin Manzullo-Thomas is a recent graduate of Messiah College and a soon-to-be graduate student at Temple University. He studies twentieth-century American religious history, primarily the history of the Brethren in Christ Church. This essay is reposted from his blog The Search for Piety and Obedience.

In his essay “The Holiness Churches: A Significant Ethical Tradition,” historian Donald W. Dayton identifies an essential difference between the holiness movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the fundamentalist and evangelical traditions of the same period:

“The Holiness movement differs from fundamentalism and evangelicalism in that it is more oriented to ethics and the spiritual life than to a defense of doctrinal orthodoxy. Indeed, one of the distinctive features of the Holiness traditions is that they have tended to raise ethics to the status that fundamentalists have accorded doctrine.”

This orientation toward ethical living (and against doctrinal precision) was evident in the lives of many of members of the Brethren in Christ Church who embraced Wesleyan Holiness teaching at the turn of the century — though few embodied it more fully than Abraham L. Eisenhower, a veterinarian-turned-roving-evangelist-turned-orphanage-caretaker.

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Prominent religion professor Stephen Prothero has begun blogging for CNN. In a recent post he reported on a speech given by Justice David Souter. At the 2010 Harvard commencement, Souter called into question the “Originalist” reading of the US Constitution. He accused originalism of being overly facile, taking the text at face value without accounting for the document’s internal contradictions. Souter used the example of the Pentagon Papers to argue that the First Amendment right to freedom of expression was contradicted by the federal government’s constitutional responsibilities to provide for the national defense and to manage foreign policy.

Souter believes that the language of the Constitution is clear, but it remains internally inconsistent because it “embodies the desire of the American people, like most people, to have things both ways. We want order and security, and we want liberty.  And we want not only liberty but equality as well.” This inherent ambiguity alarms Originalists who seek to make the Constitution self-consistent out of a “longing for a world without ambiguity, and for the stability of something unchangeable in human institutions.”

The clash between Originalist justices (eg, Antonin Scalia) and those like David Souter is a matter of epistemology, the question of how they determine what is true. They have adopted different hermeneutics of truth. Read the rest of this entry »

Bendroth, Margaret Lamberts. Fundamentalists in the City: Conflict and Division in Boston’s Churches, 1885-1950. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Carpenter, Joel A. Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Larson, Edward J. Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion. New York: Basic Books, 1997.

Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Watt, David Harrington. A Transforming Faith: Explorations of Twentieth-Century American Evangelicalism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991.

In 1980 George Marsden published Fundamentalism and American Culture, a history of the first decades of American fundamentalism. The book quickly rose to prominence in the historical profession, provoking new studies of American fundamentalism and contributing to a renewal of interest in American religious history. The book’s timing was fortunate, for it was published as a resurgent fundamentalism was becoming active in politics and society. The rise of the Christian right provoked the question: where did the movement come from?
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