As a defender of the Indians and an opponent of the methods used by the Spanish conquistadors, Bartolomé de Las Casas was as controversial a figure in the sixteenth century as he has been in the last four hundred years of historiography. Las Casas' fight to preserve the freedom of the Indians has gained for him not only devoted admirers, but also angry detractors.1 Las Casas was not the only Spaniard who defended the Indians, but his efforts are the best known. He labored for fifty years before death finally halted the steady flow of polemics from his pen. However, he was not just a sheltered academician like Vitoria, but he actively championed the rights of the Indians by working and living among them in the New World.

In November, 1549, at the beginning of the third session of King Edward VI's first parliament, legislation was introduced intending to facilitate the reformation of the ecclesiastical laws of England. In the House of Lords, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and others submitted a bill “touching Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction” which would have given the bishops and their ordinaries the power to excommunicate and to imprison those who were in need of discipline in order to help tidy up what was regarded then to be an immoral and disorderly nation. This bill passed the House of Lords and was sent down to the House of Commons for consideration.

With the endowment of a lectureship for the defense of the Christion faith, the distinguished English natural philosopher, Robert Boyle, gave the Anglican church a unique opportunity to counter the atheistic currents of thought which were posing a challenge to the faithful in the late seventeenth century. Of the Boyle lectures preached between 1692 and 1713, the most important and popular ones incorporated the new natural philosophy of the age—including some of the recently published ideas of Newton—in an apologetic which was remarkable for its flexibility and its concern with contemporary theological issues. Within the institutional framework which Boyle's generosity had provided, certain of the Anglican clergy devoted themselves anew to the age-old exercise of utilizing the discoveries of science in the service of their faith. It was particularly appropriate that they do so since many of the challenges were based implicitly or explicitly on a materialistic and mechanistic science.

Madame de Staël, in her monumental study of German culture, L'Allemagne, wrote of the Catholic church at the dawn of the nineteenth century: “Today, standing disarmed, it has the majesty of an aged lion which formerly made the universe tremble.”1 The French empire, continuing the policy of the revolution, confiscated ecclesiastical property wherever it expanded. By 1804 Napoleon distributed the church's land in Germany—which had been the most extensive in her possession of any country in Christendom—among his client rulers on the right bank of the Rhine.2 All over Europe princes were dissolving monastic communities in order to make their revenues available to the state. Perhaps the church suffered her crowning indignity in 1809, when Napoleon responded to a dispute with the pope by making him his prisoner.

Over one hundred years have passed since the conception in 1865 of what became known as the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral. This statement of Episcopalian, ecumenical principles was conceived by William R. Huntington (1838–1909), acknowledged leader of the denomination's House of Deputies, liturgical scholar, and “first presbyter” of his generation.1 Huntington was inspired by the national disunity of the Civil War years and by the reunion of the states in 1865 to seek some means of uniting the country's churches. At the same time he recognized that the Episcopal church stood in need reform if it were to serve in any way whatever as an agent of reconciliation. The result was the famous Quadrilateral. Its author designed his proposal both as a statement of “the true Anglican position” and as a basis for church unity, soon to be expressed, it was hoped, in a comprehensive, national church for America.

Among the disruptive events of 1919 and 1920 during which the American people burst from their single-minded military drive into a confusion of renewed interests finally to settle into the peculiar character and mood of the twenties, was the Interchurch World Movement of North America. Expressing the American optimism and enthusiasm at the conclusion of World War I and then the disillusionment and retreat which soon followed, the Interchurch World Movement marked a significant transition in American Protestant history. The Interchurch World Movement's financial collapse and its abortive attempt to maintain the churches’ wartime crusading zeal contributed to the general decline of Protestant creativity, influence, and prestige in America during the 1920s.

Half a year before this paper was read before a plenary session of the American Academy of Religion (26 October 1969), the program committee had requested an essay dealing in some comprehensive way with the field of American religious history. Because I would in any case have to be thinking about the introduction to my own “religious history of the American people,” I agreed.The title was sufficiently broad; and goodness knows the problems of this subject area are sufficiently large.1 Aside from innumerable large and small questions of fact there are the countless questions of emphasis and interpretation, not to mention the problem of discerning an overarching theme. I also confess great sympathy with Max Lerner's comment on the ten years he spent on America as a Civilization (1957). “I found when I came to the end of the decade,” he said, “that a number of things I had written about America were no longer valid. The American civilization had been changing drastically right under my fingertips as I was writing about it.”2 The present-day historian's predicament is, if anything, more difficult than Lerner's in that the sixties, by contrast with the fifties, have experienced a veritable earthquake of revisionism which has profoundly altered our interpretation of the entire course of American history. By reason of its screaming moral dilemmas, moreover, the decade had an especially rude impact on long accepted views of religious history. But enough of this: let us consider the substantive questions.

Time and again theologians of various schools have tried to place Pietism into a framework of theological and intellectual history. It is here impossible to pay tribute to every interpretation; this study will consider only the most important interpretations of the last century.1