Protestant churches in the early twentieth century were vexed by dwindling attendance, a clear sign of their declining social authority. The Reverend William C. Skeath complained about “the masses of the passively religious who have closed their ears to the sermon subject and their doors to pastoral visitation.” Likewise, in How to Fill the Pews, Ernest Eugene Elliott said that because no more than two-fifths of church members went to church on any given Sunday, the church had ceased to be the chief forum in American public life.

This article looks at the connection between a political movement and the evolution of Christian consciousness. It seeks to answer a series of questions not often asked, in hopes of demonstrating that these questions deserve more attention than they have generated in the past. Historians and mission scholars rightly expend a good deal of effort studying the transition in mission-established churches from European to indigenous control. Missions did more than establish churches, however. They established local Christian cultures. Yet while there is some understanding of what indigenous peoples sought to do when they assumed direction of churches founded by missionaries, there is very little idea of what indigenous peoples have sought to do when they take over local Christian cultures. But, if it is the case that, as Lamin Sanneh has argued, Christianity “stimulated the vernacular,” then the local Christian cultures built upon the vernacular, perhaps more so than the churches missions founded, are the true legacy of the missionary enterprise.

Daniel David Palmer (1845–1913) reputedly “discovered” chiropractic in 1895 when he performed the first “adjustment,” using spinal manipulation to restore hearing to an African American janitor named Harvey Lillard. Relegated to the fringes of American medical and religious orthodoxy for most of the twentieth century in part because of its metaphysical philosophy, today chiropractic is mainstream: its offices can be found in strip malls; medical insurance plans cover adjustments; and, in a dramatic readjustment of traditional cultural alignments, conservative Christians embrace chiropractic as a God-given method of pain relief.

History demonstrates that the calendar is a tool of far more significance than simply a means to organize units of time. For Roman high priests prior to the reign of Julius Caesar, the calendar was a tool of power, symbolizing political supremacy over society through the manipulation of time at will. Under Pope Gregory XIII, the calendar was a symbol of papal responsibility to ensure the proper worship of the Catholic Church. In the case of European Protestants, the Julian calendar was a symbol of religious identity and protest against Catholic domination. Likewise, within revolutionary France, the Calendrier Républicain symbolized the rejection of the Ancien Régime and Catholicism. These few examples are an indication that throughout history in various times and places calendars have proven to represent more to humanity than mere time reckoning methods. Consequently, one may approach the study of the calendar as a means to grasp cultural and religious identity within specific regional contexts.

In the several decades after their arrival in the New England states in the late 1780s, Methodists were the objects of a wide variety of attacks, some of them mutually contradictory. Their preachers were accused of being pickpockets, horse thieves, and sexual predators, while on the other hand some converts were mocked for their excessive moral seriousness. They were suspected alternatively of being agents of the English crown, spies for the French government, and Jeffersonian radicals. Further, to some it seemed that their episcopal form of government and ecclesiastical tribunals functioned as a sort of shadow government undermining the political institutions of the nation. They were attacked for their Arminian theology, in defense of which they vigorously condemned Calvinist doctrine. They were mocked as enthusiasts and fanatics whose preachers, pretending to an immediate divine calling, inflamed the passions of their listeners and whose gatherings degenerated into bedlams of disorder, confusion, and moral scandal. They were disturbers of churches, transgressing parochial boundaries, sowing disorder, and fracturing the covenant relationship between minister and flock, all of which recalled memories of the upheaval accompanying the awakenings of the 1740s. They were unlearned rustics not fit to instruct people in divinity, but they were also sly enough to worm their way into the hearts and minds of people by shrewdly hiding their true intentions and prejudicing their hearers against the standing ministers.

Near the beginning of his classic depression-era novel, The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck introduces the Reverend Jim Casy, a “Burning Busher” who “used to . . . get the people jumpin' an' talking' in tongues, an' glory-shoutin' till they just fell down and passed out.” But now Casy has given up preaching. “The sperit ain't in the people much no more;” Casy tells his friend Tom Joad, “and worse'n that, the sperit ain't in me no more.” Throughout the novel, Steinbeck underscores the crisis of religious meaning in the face of financial catastrophes confronting families like the Joads—share croppers and over-extended farmers who were forced off their land in dustbowl states such as Oklahoma, traveled west seeking work and better wages in California, only to find themselves struggling to stave off starvation, disease, and despair in crowded makeshift or government camps where they encountered sharp-tongued, fire-baptized believers like Steinbeck's character Lisbeth Sandry, a “deep-down Jesus-lover” who accused them of wickedness and warned that God was watching and smoking out sinners who took pleasure in play acting, devil-dancing, and other “hell-burning” behaviors.

A century ago, the mite box (penny collection box) was ubiquitous in North America as a religious fundraising tool, especially for women and children. Using the Methodist Woman's Foreign Missionary Society as a case study, I ask what these boxes reveal about the intersection of gender, consumerism, and capitalism from circa 1870–1930. By cutting across traditional Weberian and Marxist analyses, the discussion engages a more complex understanding of religion and capital that includes emotional attachments and material sensations. In particular, I argue that mite boxes clarify how systematic giving was institutionalized through practices that created an imaginative bridge between the immediacy of a sensory experience and the projections of social policies and prayers. They also demonstrate how objects became physical points of connection that materialized relationships that were meant to be present, but were not tangible. Last, they demonstrate the continued salience of older Christian ideas about blessings and sacrifice, even in an era normally associated with the secularization of market capitalism and philanthropy.

Recent works of modern French history have found it fashionable, when focusing on the eighteenth century from across the jagged shoals of nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, to reductively treat Francophone national identity as the dialogical interaction of two related “imagined communities.” On the one hand, as scholars such as Joseph Byrnes have unconvincingly argued, French national identity after the Enlightenment and Revolutionary eras has been shaped by the more secular “Cult of the Nation,” nourished by the Revolutionary ethos of liberté, égalité, and fraternité; on the other hand, there is the identity of France as Europe's first, most Catholic people. Such stark contrasts between opposing identities, which were in fact self-consciously nourished and cultivated by nineteenth-century writers, are overdrawn, and yet the increasingly dialogical character of French national identity in the centuries after the Revolution remains relevant to the subject of eighteenth-century historiography, for the definition of French national identity or identities is intricately intertwined with the unfolding of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment identities that arose in various nuanced forms from the intellectual and religious history of France. Recently, provocative and timely work by Jonathan Israel, Dale Van Kley, and Darrin McMahon has taken up different aspects of these broader questions concerning why and when these competing visions may have sprung from the soil of eighteenth-century France. A remaining historiographical curiosity lingers as many historians of the French Revolution are quick to ascribe this dichotomy chiefly to the years after 1791 when the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the Oath of Allegiance made allegiance to the Revolutionary government more complicated for less Gallican, more ultramontane priests. On the other hand, historians of the French Enlightenment continue to focus on the inherently secular, scientific, and anticlerical nature of the siècle de lumières as though the Church were inevitably opposed to Enlightenment innovations after mid-century, preferring and harshly defending (as Jonathan Israel has recently and voluminously argued) a comfortable and cautious acceptance of Lockeanism and Newtonianism as the only forms of Enlightenment discourse considered acceptable and capable of synthesis with Catholic orthodoxy. Differing historical perspectives on the relationship between the Enlightenment and religion remain central to the identity of participants in the French Enlightenment at various points throughout the eighteenth century and after, and such questions continue to inform the definition of what it means to be “French” today. As such, the historical processes of Enlightenment identity formation continue to require examination; such processes—one of many lietmotifs within the complex and invaluable conversations opened by the works of Israel, McMahon, and Van Kley—will be the subject of this article. For scholars remain far from a consensus on just what it meant to be Catholic and Enlightened together in the century preceding the French Revolution.

This article seeks to provide a new way of interpreting the Age of Reform and its legacy on the occasion of the Protestant Reformation's 500th anniversary. Over the past several decades, many scholars have interpreted the Age of Reform through the lens of a “Discipline Paradigm.” They have stressed the centrality of social and moral discipline in the Age of Reform and its legacy for the modern world. This paradigm has inspired much important and original scholarship, and yet it has also failed to take account of significant aspects of the Age of Reform. This article seeks to revise and challenge the “Discipline Paradigm” by focusing on one of the most important and widespread practices of the period: verbal consolation. There was an unprecedented flowering of such consolation in the Age of Reform and yet scholars have largely ignored it in their treatments of the period. This article seeks to demonstrate how viewing the Age of Reform as an Age of Consolation can provide important new insight into the character and legacy of the Age of Reform, and, indeed, into human existence in the past.

There are some historical fields which generations of scholars have plowed with special care and thoroughness. The Reformation is one of them. A survey of such labor is quite difficult, particularly if it is to be given within a limited space. I have therefore decided to confine myself in the following investigation of Reformation scholarship to the products of the last twenty years. It will be my purpose to record the chief contributions to historical knowledge and to evaluate the main interests which they reflect.

George Whitefield's racial views pose an enigma for the historian, for he has been closely identified with both the rise of humanitarian ideals and the defense of slavery. In the middle of the eighteenth century as he traveled up and down the American seaboard electrifying the English colonists with his preaching, Whitefield showed a special concern for the plight of the slaves in America. Despite this concern, a nagging fear of insurgency by the blacks gripped him and shaped his reflections about the institution of slavery.

Henry Drummond's Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1883) opens with the sentence: “Natural law is a new word.” But the term may claim a respectable antiquity: it goes back to the pre-Socratic philosophers. In Drummond's time it was merely being put to a new use. To him it meant the body of principles learned in the laboratories of physical science. In the long tradition of ethical, legal, and political thought from Hippias to Kant it implied a body of principles which, resting upon a divinely implanted endowment of human nature, underlie all acceptable ethical precepts, just laws, and sound political institutions.

In the spring of 1697 the Reverend John Higginson of Salem finished writing a laudatory “Attestation” for Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana. Higginson was enghty-one. He had lived in New England for nearly seventy years, and sixty of them had been devoted to the ministry. He had, he worte, “seen all that the Lord hath done for his people” in the Puritan colonies and rejoiced that a younger colleague had recorded it in a volume of history and biography, because he was sure that the book was, in substance, purpose, and scope “according to truth” and would be of “maninfold advantage and usefulness”. In elaboration of this he listed in his “Attestation” some ways in which he thought the Magnalia would serve “great and good ends”.

The colorful and powerful figure of Martin Luther dominates all study of the early years of the Reformation. Inevitably the first pages of the history of the Reformation in any region will begin with an effort by the author to trace the manner in which Luther's influence reached that area. In the study of the English Reformation one of the common ways of showing Luther's influence is to point to the work of the Bible translator William Tyndale. Numerous books on the English Reformation, on the history of the English Bible, and on Tyndale himself, have made of him a follower and an interpreter of Luther who played a major role in introducing the thought of the great reformer into England. A careful study of Tyndale's works, however, will show that his debt to Luther, and the “Lutheranism” of his views, has been over-stated. Tyndale, like many early sixteenth century religious reformers, made much use of Luther's name, fame, and works but without becoming a follower of those distinctive ideas of the German reformer which set him off from the other advocates of reform at the time. Tyndale's greatest debt was first to Christian humanism and then to the German-Swiss reformers of Zurich and Basel.

The revival of interest in American Protestant missionary activity is a remarkable feature of current historical writing in the United States. Two generations ago mission history was a flourishing enterprise, but was closely tied to the missionary movement itself. And when the fire went out of the crusade to evangelize the world in a single generation, the study of mission history was thereby virtually extinguished. With the exception of the distinguished writings of the late Kenneth Scott Latourette, the history of Christian missions in the modern period has been generally disregarded by American historians for most of this century. The renascence of mission history in a new, more modern and ostensibly more objective form began around a decade ago. Whether the present generation of historians will produce greater understanding of the missionary movement than did the generation of their grandfathers is an open question; in any event, the history of missions is once again the latest thing.

The year 1936 marks the four hundredth anniversary of the Institutes of the Christian Religion In that work is contained the mature expression of Calvin's religious thought. Attention may well be centered, at this time, upon one of the most procreative conceptions contained in the Institutes—a conception still rich in suggestions for our community of Christian life. The conception is that of the “societas fidelium” or the “communia sanctorum.” In the following study the “communia sanctorum” is considered in relation to its concept and to predestination, cult, discipline, and social service.

The history of the public school affords one significant means of discerning the pattern of evolving church-state relations in the United States. This is true because there have been frequent overlappings of the institutions of the church and the state in the public schools. However, the story deals with more than institutional encounter. The first amendment to the Constitution of the United States does not refer to church and state; it speaks of “an establishment of religion“ and of “the free exercise thereof.” In recent years it has become quite clear that under this language the public schools are on shaky grounds constitutionally whenever they engage in any activity of a religious nature. But the public school has always been looked to as the primary institution for instilling what is common and public in national life and thought—the shared memories and aspirations, loyalties and beliefs. Hence the public school has been confronted with the difficult responsibility of passing on the common traditions and even instilling “a common faith” (Dewey), while not engaging in “an establishment of religion.”

The influence of the Lollard movement on the Scottish Reformation was pointed out by John Knox in the sixteenth century; and in the latter part of the nineteenth century the same point was stressed by the Historiographer Royal for Scotland, P. Hume Brown. Yet in spite of such illustrious advocacy, with one or two minor exceptions, little attention has been paid to the Wycliffite tradition in fifteenth century Scotland. It has generally been taken for granted that the Lollards were unimportant and possessed little or no influence. When all the information on the movement which we possess, however, is brought together, one cannot but feel that they had a greater influence on their own time than has heretofore been allowed: Not only did the early reformers consider them very important, but today also, in spite of predilections for economic interpretations of history, they must be regarded as one of the important sources of the Scottish Reformation.

In his book Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation (Berkely, 1968), William J. Bouwsma claims that the confrontation between Rome and Venice in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was based on two different views of the world. He sees Rome as the embodiment of the authoritarianism and intolerance of the Counter Reformation and Venice as the last representative of Renaissance republicanism. Bouwsma maintains that the struggle which reached a point of crisis during the interdict of 1606-1607 was a logical development of an inborn ideological conflict between Venice and Rome. His thesis, however, does not fit the facts for the 1540s, which were a crucial decade in Venetian history since these years witnessed the acceptance of the Roman Inquisition and the first attempt to adopt an Index of Forbidden Books. During this period, Rome and Venice disagreed not on what should be implemented or rejected, but on who should have the responsibility and weaponry to enforce it. When there was a confrontation between them, it was caused by reasons of state—the political needs of two governments sharing a common border and having different political interests in Italy and/or in Europe.