Note: From Turning Points in American Church History (Baker 2024). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
Not many people feel a burning need to know about American church history. Students of American history might recognize a need to know about wars and presidents and economic policies, but church history seems like a niche topic, one obscure little shelf in the bookstore. Students of church history might thrill to the triumphs of the early church, the otherworldliness of the medieval period or the battles of the Reformation, yet be skeptical that anything truly kingdom-altering ever happened in the United States. Seminary students might wonder why they have to take church history at all, when courses on the Bible, preaching and ministry seem so much more relevant. Lay readers might feel the same way, believing that what makes Christianity compelling is what God is doing in the world today, not what church people did in the past. According to Esther 6:1, King Xerxes figured that reading history books would put him to sleep! Not exactly a ringing endorsement.
But people do need to know about American church history. American Christians, especially, need to know about it, but so does anyone who interacts with them.
The Church in the Nation’s Story, and Vice Versa
For one thing, Christianity has been the dominant religion in the territory that became the United States since the period of European colonization. The people who lived in this place could embrace Christianity, wrestle with it, reinterpret it, reject it, build institutions to spread its influence or try to curb those institutions, but they could not ignore it. Narratives of American history that minimize the impact of Christianity, then, are incomplete at best, misleading at worst. Which is not to say that the United States is or ever has been a “Christian nation.” Rather, Christianity is an indelible part of the nation’s story, no less than geography or the Constitution or the legacy of enslavement. A history of the United States with Christianity cut out would be like a map of the United States minus the Mississippi River basin – it would have a gaping hole in the middle.
For those of us who are American Christians, church history helps to explain how our faith took the shape that we inhabit. Although varieties of American Christianity (Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox; homegrown and immigrant; conservative and progressive) have their own distinctive shapes, they are lumpy and angular in some context-specific ways. In other words, American Christianity is distinctively American because it has an American history. That is, in many ways, the argument of this book. Missiologist Andrew Walls describes this phenomenon as the outworking of the principles of incarnation and translation, noting that everywhere the gospel traveled, it was embodied and spoken anew. American Christianity is not the only enculturated form that exists; American Christianity is distinctively American just as Nigerian Christianity is distinctively Nigerian, Korean Christianity is distinctively Korean and so on. Distinctively American influences include racial and denominational diversity existing in tension with white, Protestant political dominance, as well as geographic expansiveness and an economic system that favors entrepreneurship. American Christianity cannot be reduced to these features, but neither can it be understood without considering them.
It might be tempting to see embodiment and language as distractions, the dirt that must be cleared away to reveal nuggets of Christian truth. But these are also the factors that enable historical study.
The “Faith Handed Down” Is Actually Handed Down
Embodiment and language created the artifacts available to historians. It is difficult, if not impossible, for a historian to see God’s tracks in the historical record, but we can examine the actions of the people who embodied the faith and attend to their words. For Christian historians, these people are our ancestors, sometimes our antagonists and our great cloud of witnesses (Hebrews 12:1).
All of this lumpy history matters to Christians because we do not receive an impervious faith straight from ancient texts or from the realm of the supernatural. (My graduate adviser, Grant Wacker, called that the “sacred meteor” theory of religious transmission.) For good or for ill, we receive faith from the people who came before us. We need to know who they were and be able to recognize the imprint of their hands on the “faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints” (Jude 1:3 NRSV). We might want to place our own hands in the same grooves they stamped, or we might hold the tradition at a new angle, embracing it differently before passing it on. Christianity has been both durable and malleable over the years. These qualities could be viewed as weaknesses or as exactly the strength required to persist, across wildly different contexts, for two thousand years.
Readers of this book who are not Americans or not Christians might feel, at times, like they have stumbled into someone else’s family reunion. The names might be strange, the narratives perplexing. Yet these readers also can benefit. At the very least, a reader who encounters new names and terms in this book will recognize them when they show up again in other history books or in news coverage. Christians outside the United States can gain perspective on their American cousins, and on themselves, by learning how a shared faith adapted to a foreign context. And even Americans who never cross the threshold of a church will be, when conversant with history, better able to navigate a landscape full of steeples. In the first college class I ever taught, “World Religions in America” at Duke University, a student said that the towering Gothic chapel on campus intimidated her, and she hoped that learning more about religion would help her live in its shadow. I had not anticipated that answer to my question about why students had enrolled in the class, but it was a good one.
Elesha Coffman, associate professor of history, Baylor University
