Download or read book Religion and the American Nation written by John Frederick Wilson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lively survey ranges across several centuries of change in the ways historians have thought and written about religion in America. In particular, John F. Wilson is concerned with how historians have perceived religion's relationship to the political organization of our country. He begins by establishing the genesis of religion as a specialized area of American history in the nineteenth century, and then discusses religious history's development through the early 1970s. Along the way he considers topics ranging from the "long shadow" the Puritans have cast over our comprehension of religion in American history to the ascendancy of such institutions as the University of Chicago as systematizing forces in religious scholarship. Wilson then discusses how scholars, since the early 1970s, have sought to ground their accounts of American religious trends and events in ways that either avoid or transcend references to Puritanism. The rise of comparative religious histories, Wilson notes, has been the welcome outcome. Moving into the present, Wilson explores a range of behaviors, if not beliefs, that might be understood as religious aspects of American life, and looks at how the spiritual or religious dimensions of American cultural life have been expressed in gnosticism, the mass media, and consumerism. One commentator, Wilson notes, suggested that there are no longer any religions as such in America today, but only religious "brands." Wilson himself sees America as a place where there is room for Old World traditions and new spiritual initiatives, a modern nation remarkably hospitable to ancient preoccupations.
Download or read book Patriotism and Piety written by Jonathan J. Den Hartog and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2015-01-12 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book American Religion written by and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Conceived in Doubt written by Amanda Porterfield and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-04-23 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans have long acknowledged a deep connection between evangelical religion and democracy in the early days of the republic. This is a widely accepted narrative that is maintained as a matter of fact and tradition—and in spite of evangelicalism’s more authoritarian and reactionary aspects. In Conceived in Doubt, Amanda Porterfield challenges this standard interpretation of evangelicalism’s relation to democracy and describes the intertwined relationship between religion and partisan politics that emerged in the formative era of the early republic. In the 1790s, religious doubt became common in the young republic as the culture shifted from mere skepticism toward darker expressions of suspicion and fear. But by the end of that decade, Porterfield shows, economic instability, disruption of traditional forms of community, rampant ambition, and greed for land worked to undermine heady optimism about American political and religious independence. Evangelicals managed and manipulated doubt, reaching out to disenfranchised citizens as well as to those seeking political influence, blaming religious skeptics for immorality and social distress, and demanding affirmation of biblical authority as the foundation of the new American national identity. As the fledgling nation took shape, evangelicals organized aggressively, exploiting the fissures of partisan politics by offering a coherent hierarchy in which God was king and governance righteous. By laying out this narrative, Porterfield demolishes the idea that evangelical growth in the early republic was the cheerful product of enthusiasm for democracy, and she creates for us a very different narrative of influence and ideals in the young republic.
Download or read book American Religion Religion in the new nation written by David Turley and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Religion in American Life written by Jon Butler and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-07 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The new edition of Religion in American Life, written by three of the country's most eminent historians of religion, offers a superb overview that spans four centuries, illuminating the rich spiritual heritage central to nearly every event in our nation's history.
Download or read book Faith of Our Fathers written by Edwin Scott Gaustad and published by HarperCollins Publishers. This book was released on 1987 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Inventing American Religion written by Robert Wuthnow and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inventing American Religion traces the history of polling, examining its powerful rise in supplying information about the nation's faith, chronicling its current weaknesses, and tackling the difficult questions of how we should think about polls and surveys in American religion today.
Download or read book The Origins of American Religious Nationalism written by Sam Haselby and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sam Haselby offers a new and persuasive account of the role of religion in the formation of American nationality, showing how a contest within Protestantism reshaped American political culture and led to the creation of an enduring religious nationalism. Following U.S. independence, the new republic faced vital challenges, including a vast and unique continental colonization project undertaken without, in the centuries-old European senses of the terms, either "a church" or "a state." Amid this crisis, two distinct Protestant movements arose: a popular and rambunctious frontier revivalism; and a nationalist, corporate missionary movement dominated by Northeastern elites. The former heralded the birth of popular American Protestantism, while the latter marked the advent of systematic Protestant missionary activity in the West. The explosive economic and territorial growth in the early American republic, and the complexity of its political life, gave both movements opportunities for innovation and influence. This book explores the competition between them in relation to major contemporary developments-political democratization, large-scale immigration and unruly migration, fears of political disintegration, the rise of American capitalism and American slavery, and the need to nationalize the frontier. Haselby traces these developments from before the American Revolution to the rise of Andrew Jackson. His approach illuminates important changes in American history, including the decline of religious distinctions and the rise of racial ones, how and why "Indian removal" happened when it did, and with Andrew Jackson, the appearance of the first full-blown expression of American religious nationalism.
Download or read book The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America written by Frank Lambert and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-28 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did the United States, founded as colonies with explicitly religious aspirations, come to be the first modern state whose commitment to the separation of church and state was reflected in its constitution? Frank Lambert explains why this happened, offering in the process a synthesis of American history from the first British arrivals through Thomas Jefferson's controversial presidency. Lambert recognizes that two sets of spiritual fathers defined the place of religion in early America: what Lambert calls the Planting Fathers, who brought Old World ideas and dreams of building a "City upon a Hill," and the Founding Fathers, who determined the constitutional arrangement of religion in the new republic. While the former proselytized the "one true faith," the latter emphasized religious freedom over religious purity. Lambert locates this shift in the mid-eighteenth century. In the wake of evangelical revival, immigration by new dissenters, and population expansion, there emerged a marketplace of religion characterized by sectarian competition, pluralism, and widened choice. During the American Revolution, dissenters found sympathetic lawmakers who favored separating church and state, and the free marketplace of religion gained legal status as the Founders began the daunting task of uniting thirteen disparate colonies. To avoid discord in an increasingly pluralistic and contentious society, the Founders left the religious arena free of government intervention save for the guarantee of free exercise for all. Religious people and groups were also free to seek political influence, ensuring that religion's place in America would always be a contested one, but never a state-regulated one. An engaging and highly readable account of early American history, this book shows how religious freedom came to be recognized not merely as toleration of dissent but as a natural right to be enjoyed by all Americans.
Download or read book Immigration and Religion in America written by Richard Alba and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion has played a crucial role in American immigration history as an institutional resource for migrants' social adaptation, as a map of meaning for interpreting immigration experiences, and as a continuous force for expanding the national ideal of pluralism. To explain these processes the editors of this volume brought together the perspectives of leading scholars of migration and religion. The resulting essays present salient patterns in American immigrants' religious lives, past and present. In comparing the religious experiences of Mexicans and Italians, Japanese and Koreans, Eastern European Jews and Arab Muslims, and African Americans and Haitians, the book clarifies how such processes as incorporation into existing religions, introduction of new faiths, conversion, and diversification have contributed to America's extraordinary religious diversity and add a comprehensive religious dimension to our understanding of America as a nation of immigrants.
Download or read book The American Religion written by Harold Bloom and published by Chu Hartley Publishers LLC. This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: La 4ème de couv. indique : "In this fascinating work of religious criticism, Harold Bloom examines a number of American-born faiths: Pentecostalism, Mormonism, Seventh-day Adventism, Christian Science, Jehovah's Witnesses, Southern Baptism and Fundamentalism, and African American spirituality. He traces the distinctive features of American religion while asking provocative questions about the role religion plays in American culture and in each American's concept of his or her relationship to God. Bloom finds that our spiritual beliefs provide an exact portrait of our national character."
Download or read book Religion and the American Revolution written by Katherine Carté and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For most of the eighteenth century, British protestantism was driven neither by the primacy of denominations nor by fundamental discord between them. Instead, it thrived as part of a complex transatlantic system that bound religious institutions to imperial politics. As Katherine Carte argues, British imperial protestantism proved remarkably effective in advancing both the interests of empire and the cause of religion until the war for American independence disrupted it. That Revolution forced a reassessment of the role of religion in public life on both sides of the Atlantic. Religious communities struggled to reorganize within and across new national borders. Religious leaders recalibrated their relationships to government. If these shifts were more pronounced in the United States than in Britain, the loss of a shared system nonetheless mattered to both nations. Sweeping and explicitly transatlantic, Religion and the American Revolution demonstrates that if religion helped set the terms through which Anglo-Americans encountered the imperial crisis and the violence of war, it likewise set the terms through which both nations could imagine the possibilities of a new world.
Download or read book American religion literary sources documents 2 Religion in the new nation revolution to reconstruction written by David Turley and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Nature Religion in America written by Catherine L. Albanese and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1991-09-24 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charts the multiple histories of American nature religion and explores the moral and spiritual responses the encounter with nature has provoked throughout American history. Traces the connections between movements and individuals. Includes figures from popular culture such as the Hutchinson Family Singers and Davy Crockett as well as Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and John Muir.
Download or read book American Grace written by Robert D. Putnam and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-02-21 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Draws on three national surveys on religion, as well as research conducted by congregations across the United States, to examine the profound impact it has had on American life and how religious attitudes have changed in recent decades.
Download or read book A New Religious America written by Diana L. Eck and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
