A Religious History of the American People

Inscribed by author on title page.

The author places religious history within the context of the social, political, and intellectual development of America. In doing so, he makes pertinent judgments and interpretations that avoid the parochialism of the conventional church history. The result is an absorbing work that is both broad and deep -- a survey of America's communities of belief and commitment that ranges from the early advances of Spain in the New World to the religious impact of the Beatles on American culture.

Table of Contents:

American religious history in the post-Protestant era --
Western Catholicism --
The church in New Spain --
The church in New France --
The Reformation --
The Reformation in Great Britain and the age of Puritanism --
Empire, commerce, and religion : a survey of early colonization --
The rise and flowering of the Puritan spirit --
The holy commonwealths of New England --
Tensions in the New England way --
Religious diversity in Rhode Island --
Early Protestantism in the Southern colonies --
The middle colonies : Dutch, Puritans, and Quakers --
The extension of Anglicanism --
The German sects and the rise of pietism --
The German Reformed and Lutheran churches --
The shaping of colonial Presbyterianism --
The Great Awakening in New England --
Jonathan Edwards and the renewal of New England theology --
Evangelical expansion in the South --
Roman Catholicism in the American colonies --
Provincial America and the coming of the Enlightenment --
The Revolutionary era --
The emergence of American Unitarianism --
The New England theology in democratic America --
The Second Great Awakening in New England : revival, evangelism, and reform --
The great revival in the West and the growth of the popular denominations --
Presbyterians and Congregationalists in the Old Northwest : advance and conflict --
Sectarian heyday --
The communitarian impulse --
The Atlantic migration and Lutheran crisis --
The forming of the Roman Catholic church --
The expansion of the Roman Catholic church --
Anti-Catholicism and the nativist movement --
The early growth of Judaism --
The romantic mood --
Romantic religion in New England --
Catholic movements in American Protestantism --
The high tide of humanitarian reform --
Slavery, disunion, and the churches --
The churches amid civil war and reconstruction --
The rise of the black churches --
The Southern white churches after the war --
Urban growth and the Protestant churches --
Protestantism and the later immigration --
The golden age of liberal theology --
The social gospel --
Dissent and reaction in Protestantism --
The "Americanism" crisis in the Catholic church --
The Protestant establishment and the new nativism --
Crusading Protestantism --
The little war and the Great War --
The twenties : from the armistice to the crash --
The thirties : from the crash to Pearl Harbor --
Neo-orthodoxy and social crisis --
World War II and the postwar revival --
Twentieth-century Judaism --
The ancient Eastern churches in America --
Roman Catholicism in the twentieth century --
Harmonial religion since the later nineteenth century --
Piety for the age of Aquarius : theosophy, occultism, and non-Western religion --
Black religion in the twentieth century --
The turbulent sixties.