In 1996, Bernhard Lohse wondered if the Luther presented by some would recognize the Luther described by others. Trying to recognize the “political” Luther would be especially difficult. On the one hand, Thomas Müntzer was but the first in a long line of polemicists, journalists, politicians, and scholars who have accused Luther of releasing the sword of secular authority from all control and thereby opening up centuries of authoritarian subjugation. On the other hand, Peter Frarin argued in 1566 that Protestantism equaled sedition, rebellion, and the subversion of civil order. In the criticism of Luther for being either too conservative or too liberal, one thing remained fairly constant: the source of Luther's major shortcoming—his theology of the Two Kingdoms.

Inquiry into puritan “federal” doctrine established decades ago the now standard distinction between the covenant of grace and the national covenant. Perry Miller provided the first extensive analysis of the gracious covenant, and apparently it was he, too, who first found—or emphasized—in puritan sources the idea that “a nation as well as an individual can be in covenant with God.” His basic proposal, that ”the ‘covenant of grace’ … refer[red] to individuals and personal salvation in the life to come, [whereas the national covenant] applied to nations and governed their temporal success in this world,” has become a virtual article of faith in puritanist scholarship, although few recent historians have shared his profound interest in the latter covenant. Indeed, relegation of communal and this-worldly themes to a separate and inevitably secondary category has narrowed dramatically the focus of inquiry. It suffices to note that the three most recent monographs on the subject in English virtually equate “federal theology” with a gracious individualized contract exclusive to the elect (and its antithesis, the “covenant of works”).

The Schools of Christian Doctrine taught the fundamentals of Catholicism, and reading and writing, to a very large number of boys and girls in sixteenth-century Italy. Numerous laymen and laywomen gave up their holiday leisure in order to teach in these schools. The Schools of Christian Doctrine were a significant feature of the Catholic Reformation, a broad movement of Catholic renewal that began before 1517 and whose major initiatives were not necessarily responses to the Protestant Reformation. New religious orders, missionary activity, the founding of institutions to care for the sick, poor, and homeless, and a general effort to teach and preach to the laity more effectively characterized the Catholic Reformation. Ignatius Loyola, Francis Xavier, and others provided leadership and were canonized in later centuries. Scholars have given all of the above a good deal of attention, but probably only specialists are aware of the Schools of Christian Doctrine.

America made its immigrants ethnocentric. Except for the travelers from England, every other nationality sensed its cultural distinctiveness soon after settling here with countrymen. The process of identity-consciousness went on continually with every group. In a strange and unknown environment, newcomers, particularly the least Anglo-Saxon, joined their fellows for a security of continuity, yearning for that Old World basis of religion, language, and social customs. Although these fresh ties could not restore their European community exactly, they could offer a reasonable substitute for adjustment, the American immigrant society. To latecoming arrivals the reconstructed ethnic colony moderated the differences of the original and destined community and made the contrast less jarring. The immigrants had refashioned the old primary settlements in America and struggled to maintain them. In the recent debate over the acculturative process, how the “melting pot” worked, certainly the ultural pluralists describe best the first-generation communities.

In the era between the Civil War and the Depression the mythical character called the “American Mind” was troubled. All was well during the day when prosperity and success faced him at every turn, but at night he would sometimes dream of his childhood and awake feeling strangely uneasy. His analyst explained that this tension was the product of latent guilt feelings and suggested for therapy that he read himself to sleep with recent studies of the oppressive effects of Puritanism on young national minds. Turning to these works, the “American Mind” found that the analyst had been quite right. The source of the guilt feelings, he discovered, was an irrational phase of his development called the Reformation. This phase had been dominant when he lived in New England (he since had moved to the Midwest), but he was assured that the latest scholarship had discovered its influence to be harsh, grotesque, superstitious, narrowminded, illiberal, and worst of all intolerant.1 The problem was, one expert informed him, that this era “was unleavened by the spirit of the Renaissance.” Another observed that the Reformation attitudes were a “subtle poison” flowing thorugh the veins of the entire social organism. Still another implied that the “splendor of the Renaissance” had been delayed three hundred years by Reformation intolerance. Convinced that the open-mindedness of the Renaissance was healthier than the irrational bigotry of the Reformation, the “American Mind” of this era began to feel easier about his past. He resolved to tolerate everyone, except of course his more conservative enemies whom he damned as “Puritan.”

I have long been intrigued with the role of the American churches in dividing the nation and reinforcing the sectional conflict that led to the Civil War. Elsewhere I have argued that evangelical Protestantism was a major bond of unity for the United States during the first part of the nineteenth century; that the chief institutional forms of this faith were the large popular denominations—Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, each with nationwide constituencies; that these denominations, increasingly agitated by disputes over slavery, sundered into northern and southern factions long before political rupture, thus opening the first major cleavage between slaveholding and free states; and that the denominational schisms portended and to some extent provoked the crisis of the Union in 1861. What I wish to pursue further in this article is how the regional religion which these schisms both exposed and augmented not only broke a primary bond of national unity but also furnished a persuasive example of sectional independence, encouraged the myth of peaceable secession, reinforced North-South alienation, and heightened the moral outrage which each section felt against the other. The “inner civil war” of the divided churches thus exacerbated the ordeal of the Union and confirmed the nation's course to unrepressed conflict.

Healing—whether via medical or miraculous means—has increasingly caught the attention of scholars of North American Protestantism within the past decade. Recent studies have convincingly argued that healing was at the heart of Protestant identity, especially in turn-of-the-twentieth-century United States and Canada. Loosely defined as the restoring of physical or emotional well-being with recourse to medical, symbolic, or religious means, healing is often distinguished from curing as a therapeutic approach with more “ho-listic” goals than the cessation of particular physical ailments. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century groups known for their commitment to divine healing and their antipathy to biomedicine, such as Christian Scientists and Pentecostals, are readily fit within this paradigm of healing, but so too are groups often thought to have disparaged faith healing in their embrace of biomedicine, such as mainstream Anglo-Protestants. Through foreign and domestic medical missions, establishing hospitals and medical schools, and initiating deaconess orders, mainstream Protestant groups, including Anglicans and Methodists, made healing central to their public identity and daily practice. In the process, they faced the tricky negotiation of embracing epistemologies of scientific medicine without surrendering their own theologies of God's omnipotent love, all the while living in an increasingly “therapeutic culture.” Complicating their task was their persistent encounter with different, often competing versions of religious healing, whether in the encounter with natives in colonial missions or in the challenge of rival therapeutic theologies such as those of Christian Science. Making their way through this era of increasing medicalization (and increasing contestation of medicalization), mainstream Protestants developed a strain of Christian healing that was unabashedly medicalized and modern, and they testified to its power in print and in practice.

On 16 March 1742, Jonathan Edwards's church in Northampton adopted a new covenant of faith. Written in the heat of the Great Awakening, the document began, predictably, by acknowledging “the blessed manifestations and fruits of [God's] gracious presence in this town” during the recent spiritual revivals. It then plunged into more worldly matters. It called on every church member to deal honestly and justly in secular business: they were not “in any matter” to “overreach or defraud” their “neighbor…and either willfully or through want of care, injure him in any of his honest possessions or rights.” The oath became more explicit. Debtors were to pay their creditors, so to avoid “willfully or negligently” wronging others. Indeed, debtors promised to forego “rest till … that restitution, or …that satisfaction” were effected. Likewise, creditors pledged to eschew “wordly gain, or honor, or interest…or getting the better” of their “competitors” as the “governing aim” of their business. Those who managed public affairs also were to forsake competitiveness. They agreed to relinquish their private interests for the sake of equity, especially “concerning any outward possessions, privileges, rights or properties.” Although the covenant dealt with other matters, it sustained its striking focus on commerce. Even as it neared its conclusion, it used economic metaphor to urge piety, presenting life as capital “to be laboriously spent in the business of religion: ever making it our greatest business.”

In a review published in 1849, Ephraim Peabody observed that “America has the mournful honor of adding a new department to the literature of civilization,—the autobiographies of escaped slaves.” As Peabody went on to point out, “these narratives show how it [slavery] looks as seen from the side of the slave. They contain the victim's account of the workings of this great institution.” As such, they have proved an invaluable resource for examining the religious life of Afro-Americans under slavery. Yet despite the fact that Peabody and others recognized “the peculiar hardships to which the female slave [was] subjected” during the nineteenth century, few recent studies of slavery have paid attention to differences in gender and none, to my knowledge, have explored the impact to gender differences on the religious life of slaves.

American Christian churches in the first three quarters of the nineteenth century were in general strongly conservative in social and economic outlook, and solidly supported the individualism of the time. But after the Civil War the swiftly and often painfully changing social scene stimulated widespread interest in economic and social matters and contributed to extensive rethinking of traditional views on the part of many Christians. Important reformist, progressive, and radical Christian social movements rose and agitated the churches. Hence, when socialism grew with startling rapidity in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century, the attention of Christians was powerfully drawn to the new development. In that period when awareness of the social problem throbbed in the atmosphere of the time, that period of muckraking and trustbusting, progressivism and the sociological novel, the Socialist Party found rich soil in which to grow. The socialist vote grew from slightly over 400,000 in 1904 to some 900,000 in 1912, while party membership increased from 25,000 to 120,000 in the same period. By the latter date there were over one thousand socialists in elective positions across the land, most of them in minor posts, but with fifty mayors and twenty legislators included in the total. This rapid growth raised in a new and urgent way the problem of the relationship that should exist between Christianity and socialism.

Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon (1648–1717) has been best known for her role in the Quietist controversy of late-seventeenthcentury France, leading to the public debate that pitted her defender, Fenelon, against Bossuet. Madame de Maintenon, the wife of Louis XIV, also became an opponent, adding her influence to that of Bossuet, so that Madame Guyon was imprisoned in the Bastille from 1698 to 1703.

American Christianity is so diversified and confusing and its material is of such vast extent that the scholars who have worked at the broader aspects of its history have had to bring to their study certain interpretative theses in order to find their way through the material at all. These interpretative theses, some implicitly held and others explicitly stated, some relatively adequate and others fairly weak, have paved the way for a great deal of intensive research, so that the young discipline of American Church History has a solid and illuminating body of material. Out of the research thus far undertaken have sprung new themes of interpretation, so that what may be called an “historiographical cycle” operates. This interaction of research and interpretation has functioned sufficiently well so that the overall picture of American Christian history grows steadily clearer. The process of clarification has, however, proceeded satisfactorily only to a point—to the Civil War. For the years since the Civil War, the picture has not yet come into sharp focus. The interpretative theses thus far proposed have had serious limitations, and as a result the historiographical cycle has not operated to best advantage. The excellent monographic studies that have been done remain therefore somewhat unrelated and leave us with a rather fragmentary understanding of religious history since 1865. Yet in these years occurred decisive developments which must be further probed and clarified if we are to understand more fully the contemporary American religious scene, now so important a part of the total life of the world church. To be sure most of the significant movements of the period have received some attention, but they can be fully understood and their significance grasped only as they are delineated as part of the total history of American Christianity with the interconnections traced and the polarities analyzed. More fruitful and better-directed monographic studies will follow from the setting forth of fresh and rounded themes of interpretation; the historiographical cycle will then operate to better advantage for this important period.

Charles Grandison Finney appeared on the American religious scene in the early 1820's, and following a rather dramatic conversion experience he determined to enter the ministry. With some tutoring from his pastor, the Reverend George W. Gale, but no formal theological training, he began to preach in the “burned-over district” of upper New York State. His early successes in attaining conversions led him to adopt a pragmatic approach to the problems of theology and thus to be quite impatient with the Calvinistic theological system.

Anne Hutchinson has been one of the few women to attain canonical status in the history of colonial New England. Her marvelous intellectual abilities (so unusual in a seventeenth-century woman), her popularity among Boston men as well as women, and the powerful political and theological implications of her challenge render Hutchinson a force that must be explored if colonial Massachusetts is to be understood. Not only are historians fascinated by this extraordinary woman herself, they are intrigued by the colony's response to her; for in that very response the founders may have revealed their essential character. So a few books and many articles have analyzed and reanalyzed Hutchinson as victim of Puritan injustice, as threat to the Puritan experiment, as menopausal neurotic, as antinomian heretic, as rebel (occasionally a protofeminist one).

Students of Latin American pentecostalism often have viewed it more as a symptom of emerging mass society than as a vital religious force. Studies based on development theory, especially, assume that popular movements in the Third World, such as Brazilian pentecostalism, Spiritism, and Umbanda, may promote national integration by offering marginal peoples rudimentary preparation for civic roles. Presumably the decision-making and leadership experience gained in religious participation later may be applied to community and political activities.

On 23 July 1933, the pro-Nazi German Christian movement won a stunning victory in the elections for representatives to local parish councils of the German Evangelical Church. In many areas, especially north and eastern Germany where the National Socialist party itself was strongest, the German Christians attracted as much as 75 percent of the vote. The Old Prussian Union church, which embraced most of the political unit of Prussia, felt the effects most profoundly. Upon filling the higher synods after the parish elections, the German Christians were the majority in seven of eight provincial representative bodies. Only the provincial synod in Westphalia retained a non-German Christian majority. Yet this resulted less from a lack of a strong German Christian following in the parishes than from an intentionally undemocratic filtering system that protected higher synods from the Nazi sympathizers.

In 1650 the distinguished church historian Archbishop James Ussher of Ireland announced his meticulously calculated time of the Creation: early Saturday evening, 22 October 4004 B.C.E., a date immortalized in the margins of countless Bibles for nearly three centuries. Among evangelical Protestants who believed in the inerrancy of Scripture this date came to mark the beginning of human history. For some believers it remained a landmark until the late twentieth century; others abandoned it as early as the 1860s. Among American evangelicals no one played a more important role in discrediting Ussher's chronology than William Henry Green, an Old Testament scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary. One of Green's Princeton colleagues called his demonstration of Ussher's fallacy “the most important biblical discovery of our time.” In some ways it was, although its full impact did not come until the second half of the twentieth century.

In December 2004 the George W. Bush administration filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of two Kentucky counties barred by the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals from posting framed copies of the Ten Commandments in their courthouses, alongside a proclamation from President Ronald Reagan marking 1983 as the Year of the Bible. To those who would object that even a minimalist interpretation of the separation of church and state might preclude the prominent display of a religious text in just that place—the courthouse—where the principle of separation is normatively enforced, the White House offered assurance that “Official acknowledgement and recogntion of the Ten Commandments' influence on American legal history comport with the Establishment Clause [of the First Amendment].”

In 1754, the Scottish minister John Gillies (1712–1796) published a collection of historical accounts concerning “remarkable periods of the success of the Gospel.” Its composer was a spider in a web of correspondents in Europe and North America who believed they were living in an extraordinary time of revival in Christianity. Collective conversions and signs of repentance and faith were reported from all parts of the world and placed in a large eschatological perspective. After the Protestant Reformation—the climax of church history since the New Testament—a great decline had set in comparable to the Middle Ages. The “Great Awakening” seemed to recapture the spirit of the first Pentecost and offered prospects for a further extension of God's Kingdom. By means of missionary work among the heathen peoples, the Gospel would reach the ends of earth. Finally, after the collective conversion of the Jews and a millennium of peace, the time would come for the Lord of the Church to appear on the clouds of heaven to gather the harvest of all times.