American Protestantism has been the dominant form of Christianity in the United States since the colonial era, and has had a profound impact on American society. Understanding this religious tradition is crucial to understanding American culture.
Written from various disciplinary perspectives, including history, theology, liturgics and religious studies, the Cambridge Companion to American Protestantism explores the central beliefs and practices of American Protestant life, as well as Protestantism’s numerous intersections with American culture. It also offers a comprehensive overview of major streams of American Protestantism: Anglican, Reformed, Lutheran, Anabaptist, Baptist, Stone-Campbell, Methodist, Holiness and Pentecostal.
The book is aimed at undergraduate and graduate students, as well as an interested general audience, and could form the basis for curricular assignments on a variety of topics.
Oikonomia Network readers will find much of interest in this volume. In addition to the obvious importance of the Bible, doctrine and theology, it includes a full chapter on work and vocation. Other chapters include politics and government, education, temperance, Protestant-Catholic ecumenism, gender and sexuality, race and medical care.
The chapter on work and vocation is by Joshua Sweeden, professor of church and society at Nazarene Theological Seminary. He covers ground that will be familiar to ON readers, but very useful as an introduction for students: not only a basic theology of work as a part of God’s good creation, and vocation as a means of following Christ, but also the complex ways in which this doctrine has interacted with American capitalism and consumerism – contributing to many improvements in quality of life as well as greater respect for the dignity of work, but also contributing to a workaholic culture among the privileged classes, alienation among the less privileged, and fragmentation of identity among all.
Other chapters also raise questions about what human flourishing and a moral life have meant throughout the history of American Protestantism, and for whom.
- Daniel Williams, professor of history at the University of West Georgia, considers how the pervasive influence of Protestantism on all aspects of American government has formed the American tendency to view politics as a moral enterprise.
- Jason Vickers, professor of theology at Asbury Theological Seminary, explores the restorationist impulse undergirding much of American theology and scriptural interpretation.
- Steven Hoskins, associate professor of religion at Nazarene Theological Seminary, notes the way Protestant education aimed from the beginning “to read, and to read the Bible written into the fabric of the nation.”
- My own chapter illuminates temperance as one outworking of the moral enterprise of politics.
- Maura Jane Farrelly, associate professor and chair of American Studies at Brandeis University, explores how Protestants and Catholics felt for generations that they had different notions of freedom, and why.
- Elizabeth Flowers, associate professor of religion at Baylor University, and Karen Seat, professor of religion at the University of Arizona, discuss the dueling perspectives in Protestant attitudes to gender and sexuality between democratic egalitarianism and a theological commitment to hierarchy.
- Dennis Dickerson, professor of history at Vanderbilt University, displays how black Christians fought for their own right to flourish in the face of an American project which repeatedly failed them.
- Heather Hartung Vacek, vice president and dean of Moravian Theological Seminary and Lancaster Theological Seminary, explores how Protestant theology has both helped and hindered the flourishing of the mentally ill.
In addition to these and other topical chapters, the book features essays on specific traditions as well as four essays — very suitable for curricular use! — that give an overview of American Protestant history. Here’s a brief excerpt from the chapter on the Industrial Age, 1865-1945:
American Protestantism has never been monolithic. Lutherans, Episcopalians, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Quakers, Disciples of Christ and other denominations have all worshipped in their own ways. Nevertheless, a broad evangelical consensus dominated American Protestantism in the first half of the 1800s. These Protestants advocated a relatively straightforward interpretation of the Bible; they believed that Christian conversion was necessary for an individual’s salvation, and that the United States could only survive as a republic if a significant proportion of its population remained Protestant – because they believed their faith to be the wellspring of civic virtue. The social and intellectual changes of the decades after the American Civil War began to fracture this consensus, even as they shaped the United States into the nation we recognize today. More precisely, they created debate over how to achieve the still agreed-upon goal of Protestantizing the nation. Social shifts included industrialization, urbanization and immigration from non-Protestant areas of the globe such as Eastern and Southern Europe and East Asia. Meanwhile, women’s educational and professional opportunities expanded while the civil rights of African Americans contracted. Intellectual shifts included the popularization of Darwinian evolution and a new “higher critical” approach to interpreting the Bible that questioned its status as a direct revelation from God. The Civil War had also raised hermeneutical questions: Northern and Southern white Protestants had reached polar-opposite conclusions on the morality of slavery. Bullets, not scholars or pastors, adjudicated their differences. Yet even though subsequent economic, social and political crises like the world wars and the Great Depression would further strain Protestant unity, American Protestants largely retained their cultural dominance throughout this era.
For much more, check out the Cambridge Companion to American Protestantism.
Jennifer Woodruff Tait, editor, Christian History magazine; webmaster, Theology of Work Project; priest, St. John’s Episcopal Church
