American Piety

How religious are Americans these days? How many still believe in God, in Biblical miracles, in heaven and hell? Do people pray? How much money is being given to churches, by Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and other groups? American Piety, the first of a three-volume study of religious commitment, answers these and a host of other questions about the contemporary religious scene. Particularly startling are the contrasts in beliefs, practices, and experiences revealed among the eleven major Christian denominations whose membership is compared.

Female Piety and the Invention of American Puritanism reconsiders the standard critical view that women's religious experiences were either silent consent or hostile response to mainstream Puritan institutions. In this groundbreaking new approach to American Puritanism, Bryce Traister asks how gendered understandings of authentic religious experience contributed to the development of seventeenth-century religious culture and to the "post-religious" historiography of Puritanism in secular modernity. He argues that women were neither marginal nor hostile to the theological and cultural ambitions of seventeenth-century New England religious culture and, indeed, that radicalized female piety was in certain key respects the driving force of New England Puritan culture. Uncovering the feminine interiority of New England Protestantism, Female Piety and the Invention of American Puritanism positions itself against prevalent historical arguments about the rise of secularism in the modern West. Traister demonstrates that female spirituality became a principal vehicle through which Puritan identity became both absorbed within and foundational for pre-national secular culture. Engaging broadly with debates about religion and secularization, national origins and transnational unsettlements, and gender and cultural authority, this is a foundational reconsideration both of American Puritanism itself and of "American Puritanism" as it has been understood in relation to secular modernity.

In Patriotism and Piety, Jonathan Den Hartog argues that the question of how religion would function in American society was decided in the decades after the Constitution and First Amendment established a legal framework. Den Hartog shows that among the wide array of politicians and public figures struggling to define religion’s place in the new nation, Federalists stood out—evolving religious attitudes were central to Federalism, and the encounter with Federalism strongly shaped American Christianity. Den Hartog describes the Federalist appropriations of religion as passing through three stages: a "republican" phase of easy cooperation inherited from the experience of the American Revolution; a "combative" phase, forged during the political battles of the 1790s–1800s, when the destiny of the republic was hotly contested; and a "voluntarist" phase that grew in importance after 1800. Faith became more individualistic and issue-oriented as a result of the actions of religious Federalists. Religious impulses fueled party activism and informed governance, but the redirection of religious energies into voluntary societies sapped party momentum, and religious differences led to intraparty splits. These developments altered not only the Federalist Party but also the practice and perception of religion in America, as Federalist insights helped to create voluntary, national organizations in which Americans could practice their faith in interdenominational settings. Patriotism and Pietyfocuses on the experiences and challenges confronted by a number of Federalists, from well-known leaders such as John Adams, John Jay, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and Timothy Dwight to lesser-known but still important figures such as Caleb Strong, Elias Boudinot, and William Jay.

How is it that some conservative groups are viscerally antigovernment even while enjoying the benefits of government funding? In Piety and Public Funding historian Axel R. Schäfer offers a compelling answer to this question by chronicling how, in the first half century since World War II, conservative evangelical groups became increasingly adept at accommodating their hostility to the state with federal support. Though holding to the ideals of church-state separation, evangelicals gradually took advantage of expanded public funding opportunities for religious foreign aid, health care, education, and social welfare. This was especially the case during the Cold War, when groups such as the National Association of Evangelicals were at the forefront of battling communism at home and abroad. It was evident, too, in the Sunbelt, where the military-industrial complex grew exponentially after World War II and where the postwar right would achieve its earliest success. Contrary to evangelicals' own claims, liberal public policies were a boon for, not a threat to, their own institutions and values. The welfare state, forged during the New Deal and renewed by the Great Society, hastened—not hindered—the ascendancy of a conservative political movement that would, in turn, use its resurgence as leverage against the very system that helped create it. By showing that the liberal state's dependence on private and nonprofit social services made it vulnerable to assaults from the right, Piety and Public Funding brings a much needed historical perspective to a hotly debated contemporary issue: the efforts of both Republican and Democratic administrations to channel federal money to "faith-based" organizations. It suggests a major reevaluation of the religious right, which grew to dominate evangelicalism by exploiting institutional ties to the state while simultaneously brandishing a message of free enterprise and moral awakening.

This superb collection of essays challenges the growing tension about religion and the arts by dissecting the intriguing ways religion and the arts have inte frsected in a long, vivid, necessary, and largely positive relationship from the early nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. The essays here are unusually strong, sophisticated, mature, and insightful. They are remarkably readable, not merely for art historians but for a broadly interested and intelligent audience. The result is a truly fascinating collection whose essays touch on a wide range of important and fascinating topics in the two-hundred year experience of both American art and American religion. —Jon Butler, Yale University, author of Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People and Religion in American History: A Reader.

A study of Christian conservative religious and political beliefs as aspects of constructing and maintaining a world view. Considering a series of spheres from the self to the family, the economy, the polity and the world, analyzes published writings by a diversity of people adhering to the movement to reveal the overarching structure of the reality they inhabit. Paper edition (unseen), $17.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR