Ten books you should read to understand American religion

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By Jennifer Woodruff Tait

Inspired by a recent email exchange, we’re going to try to start occasionally featuring here some recommended resources about church history. Of course, in any one of our now 109 fantastic issues and two special guides you will always find a recommended resources section—but more doesn’t hurt; we know that some of you out there are some pretty serious readers.

I’m starting with a list on American religion for two reasons: it’s the field I know best, and it’s immediately relevant to all of our everyday contexts. In future posts I’ll recommend some resources on other times and places (the Reformation, the early church, the missions movement) and on great Christians of the past.

So....here’s my top ten list for the American religious scene, in chronological order:

1) Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England by David Hall.  If you want to dig deep into what the earliest American colonists believed, this is a great book to start with, as Hall looks at the religious lives of many ordinary people.

2) Awash in a Sea of Faith by Jon Butler. You’ll have to suffer some sarcastic asides about Christians, but if you are up to the challenge, this is a good and troubling book to wrestle with. Butler’s thesis is that the Puritan experiment had nothing, faith-wise on America after 1800 and that we have grown to be a country more suffused with faith over the years, not less. See what you think.

3) Errand into the Wilderness by Perry Miller. Years ago, almost everybody thought that writing about American religion meant writing about Congregationalists and Presbyterians. This isn’t so true now, but this is the best and most famous book ever written from that perspective and raises challenging questions about our own day and the “American Dream.” (It also happens to be the book I was reading on 9/11. True story.)

4) America’s God, from Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln by Mark Noll. The beginning of this is slow going. But the last 200–250 pages, which explains how Americans ever came to defend slavery and use the Bible in the process, are masterful.

5) Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America by Timothy Smith.  (You can read it online for free at that link!) This was the first major book to explore the connection of evangelical religion to 19th-century progressive causes like abolitionism, temperance, and female suffrage, and to defend conservative Protestantism to the academic establishment.

6) Discovering an Evangelical Heritage by Don Dayton. This short and entertaining book took Smith’s argument and promoted it, not to secular historians, but to evangelical insiders. (It was also a huge influence on....)

7) The Poisoned Chalice by Jennifer Woodruff Tait. I promise this is the only time I’ll recommend something of mine :-)  but I sought in this book to explain (and, originally, defend....ten years ago when I began to write this there was a lot less Christian-favorable historiography) the theological and philosophical basis of the temperance movement, and more broadly of evangelical Christian lifestyle issues. Don’t let the “Methodist” in the title fool you; it’s about all of us. (If you want a short version of the argument you can get it here.)

8) Fundamentalism and American Culture by George Marsden.  This book has popped up repeatedly in our magazine’s recommended resources section, and with good reason; it explains the cultural and theological roots of 20th-century fundamentalism better than anything else out there. Marsden, a believer, is extremely respectful of his subject matter—this was one of the first academic books I ever read about conservative Christians which came from so fair a perspective. (There are lots more now, one of which is....)

9) Revive Us Again by Joel Carpenter. This book builds on Marsden’s work to talk about the development of fundamentalism and eventual rise of evangelicalism up through the middle of the 20th century. (Follow it with....)

10) From Bible Belt to Sunbelt by Darren Dochuck, on how the migration of evangelical Southerners to California transformed not only religion but politics (here’s one review.)

 

So...there’s my list for now. I’ll check back in a little bit with the 10 best books on the Reformation!