Offering a rich selection of classic and recent scholarship, this reader presents an extraordinary portrait of religion's fate across four centuries of the American experience. Its essays cover major issues in American history and religion, detailing religion's purpose in American life and examining many topics that are either ignored or minimized in similar books. It addresses the decline and revival of American Indian religion; immigration, assimilation, and separation and how they have contributed to the American religious experience; political activism; and religious bigotry. It also discusses Catholics, Protestants and fundamentalism, Mormons, and Jews. Selected debates encourage readers to test conflicting interpretations about religion's impact on American history, and original documents trace religion's influence on slavery, race, and politics from the colonial era to the late twentieth century. Religion in American History serves as a one-volume tour through America's tumultuous, varied, and often misunderstood religious past.

Introduction

Part I: The Colonial Period

1. The Spiritual Crisis of European Colonization -- Calvin Martin, "The European
Impact on the Culture of a Northeastern Algonquian Tribe: An Ecological
Interpretation"

2. Did the Puritans Start it All? -- Perry Miller, "Errand Into the Wilderness"

3. William Penn and the English Origins of American Religious Pluralism -- Edmund S.
Morgan, "The World and William Penn"

4. Document: Christianity Shapes American Slavery -- Thomas Bacon, " A Sermon to
Maryland Slaves, 1749"

5. Debate: "The Great Awakening" - Fact or Fiction? -- Harry S. Stout, "Religion,
Communications, and the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution", and Jon
Butler, "Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretative
Fiction"

6. The Challenge of a Woman's Religion -- Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, "The
Spiritual Pilgrimage of Sarah Osborn (1714-1796)"

Part II: The Nineteenth Century

7. Immigrants and Religion in America -- Jay P. Dolan, "The Immigrants and Their
Gods: A New Perspective in American Religious History"

8. Female Language in the American Religious Experience -- Barbara Welter, "The
Feminization of American Religion"

9. The Rise of an American Original: Mormonism -- Gordon S. Wood, "Evangelical
America and Early Mormonism"

10. What Religious Pluralism Meant -- R. Laurence Moore, "Insiders and Outsiders in
American Historical Narrative and American History"

11. Documents and Debate: On Whose Side? God, Slavery and the Civil War
Frederick Douglass, "Address on 'Evangelical Flogging'", and George D.
Armstrong, "The Christian Doctrine of Slavery: God's Work in God's Way

12. The Occult in the American Religious Tradition -- Mary Farrell Bednarowski,
"Women in Occult America"

13. Indians, Missions, and Cultural Conflict -- Raymond J. DeMallie, "The Lakota
Ghost Dance: An Ethnohistorical Account"

14. Religion and Politics -- Robert P. Swierenga, "Ethnoreligious Political Behavior in
the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Voting, Values, Cultures"

15. The Creation of an African-American Preaching Style -- William E. Montgomery,
"The Preachers"

16. The Rise of American Fundamentalism -- George M. Mardsen "Fundamentalism
as an American Phenomenon: A Comparison with English Evangelicalism"

Part III: The Twentieth Century

17. Religion and Sociology -- Bryan Wilson, "Secularization: The Inherited Model"

18. Commercial Culture and American Christianity -- Leigh Eric Schmidt, "The Easter
Parade: Piety, Fashion, and Display"

19. Debate: 1920-1940: Dark Ages of American Protestantism? -- Robert T. Handy,
"The American Religious Depression, 1925-35", and Joel A. Carpenter,
"Fundamentalist Institutions and the Rise of Evangelical Protestantism, 1929-1942"

20. Judaism and the American Experience -- Jonathon D. Sarna, "Seating and the
American Synagogue"

21. The Unspeakable Relationship: Religion and Bigotry in America -- Leonard
Dinnerstein, "Antisemitism in the Depression Era (1933-1939)"

22. Catholicism, Gender, and Modern Miracles -- Robert A. Orsi, "'He Keeps Me
Going': Women's Devotion to Saint Jude Thaddeus and the Dialectics of Gender in
American Catholicism, 1929-1965"

23. Martin Luther King and the Secular Power of Religious Rhetoric -- Hortense J.
Spillers, "Martin Luther King and the Style of Black Sermon"

24. Debate and Documents: Religion, Society, and Politics in Modern Times -- Joseph
A. Johnson, Jr. "Jesus the Liberator", U.S. Catholic Bishops, "A Pastoral
Message: Economic Justice for All and Jerry Falwell, "The Imperative of Moral
Involvement"