This essay highlights U.S. pentecostals' and charismatics' cultivation of more experiential forms of identification with Jews and with Israel that in turn played a crucial role in the global growth of Christian Zionism. Already at the turn of the twentieth century, key figures experimented with “Judeo-centric” forms of ritual and dress, merging eschatological concerns inherited from nineteenth-century Protestantism with British Israelite ideas equating Anglo-Saxons with the lost tribes of Israel. In subsequent decades these racial notions were pushed to the fringes of the pentecostal movement, but the intense sense of identification with Israel remained. Building on the emergent mythology in the midcentury U.S. of a shared “Judeo-Christian tradition,” adherents increasingly stressed their religious and cultural (as opposed to racial) connections with God's “chosen people.” And by the late twentieth century, the 1960s counterculture, a burgeoning emphasis on the therapeutic, and growing religious diversity all facilitated pentecostals' and charismatics' renewed experimentation with “exotic” Israel-themed rituals. Significantly, believers' appropriation of Jewish-based religious practices and identities transcended nationalistic categories, and reinforced post-American sensibilities in important respects. As such, U.S.-based evangelists and broadcast ministries were able to disseminate pentecostalized expressions of Christian Zionism well beyond North America, and help catalyze a transnational, global movement.

A common faith swept the country. According to Mark Noll's now-famous thesis, early republican and antebellum America was characterized by an ideological synthesis of evangelical religion, republican political theory, and common sense epistemology. Noll calls it “the Protestant consensus.” John Modern largely agrees. In Modern's telling, antebellum America was mired in the same entanglement of piety, politics, and epistemology. But in lieu of the civic language of consensus, Modern describes his formation as an “atmosphere,” a kind of conceptual cloud-hanging so thickly in the air that antebellum Americans inhaled it with every breath. This pervasive atmosphere is what Modern means by “the secular.”

In Secularism In Antebellum America, John Modern extensively and directly engages with what he calls Mark Noll's “magisterial treatment of evangelicalism” in America's God. In light of this, I have been surprised at what a challenge it has been to bring these books into conversation with one another on the subject of evangelicals and evangelicalism. The central reason for the difficulty, I think, is that Modern's treatment of antebellum evangelical print culture—his chapter entitled “Evangelical Secularism and the Measure of Leviathan”—is not actually about evangelicals. It is about secularism. And that, in a nutshell, is Modern's point. Throughout his book, he works hard to bring what he sees as the background into the foreground, rendering the emergent atmosphere of secularism as the protagonist in his story of evangelical media practices.

In 1921, Shailer Mathews coined what became a classic, yet somewhat obtuse, definition of the social gospel in North American religious history. He defined it as “the application of the teaching of Jesus and the total message of the Christian salvation to society, the economic life, and social institutions such as the state, the family, as well as to individuals.” For all the problems with Mathews's definition, it does serve as a useful template for understating the social gospel, especially interpreting what Mathews meant by the phrase, “the total message of the Christian salvation.”

Republicanism, both of these authors teach us, by the mid-nineteenth century became indistinguishable from the aims of religion in the United States. A broad array of protestants agreed that the aims of religion cohered with the political principle of republicanism—or the principle that men could only achieve freedom through self-rule. Noll usefully shows that this concept of republicanism underwent a series of changes from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth. Beginning in the late eighteenth century republicanism referenced liberty from tyranny, man as citizen, and virtue as a kind of constraint on individual interests. Noll, however, argues that two versions of republicanism competed in this earlier period: communitarian republicanism, based in “the reciprocity of personal morality and social-well being,” and liberal republicanism, which valued the independence of the individual. Noll and Modern argue that by the mid-nineteenth century, the liberal version won out. Citizens imagined their freedom to be enabled by a market-based society more than by a community of virtue. For political historians these definitions are not new or controversial, but for historians of American religious history republicanism is an unlikely category of analysis because we see it as “political theory” rather than theology. But as both Noll and Modern argue, republicanism became the very substance of theology in the United States.

Like many historians, I am working on a ghost story. This one begins in 1813, the beginning of the American Baptist mission to Burma. Like those told by John Modern and Mark Noll, this story is contoured by war—the American Civil War and a series of Anglo-Burmese Wars waged between 1824 and 1885. Its specters appear in missionary letters and diaries, newspapers reports, illustrated travelogues, and concurrently produced Burmese royal chronicles and ritual networks. As I chase these ghosts, I am continually haunted by a bellow I hear coming from historians who have reclaimed evangelicalism as the determining subject of American religious history.

Three vignettes underscore that, in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century United States, social gospels often fared best outside the walls of the institutional churches. They also reveal diverging interpretations of Christianity and the church that begin to explain the divergence between religious liberalism and social progressivism during this time.

Let me start by thanking Professor Mark Noll, and while the topic of non-human agents is in the air, I would like to declare my thanks to America's God for inciting me and inspiring me to narrate my own version of events. Talk about objective conditions! I would also like to thank Sonia Hazard, Dana Logan, Caleb Maskell, and Alex Kaloyanides for their meticulous attention to America's God and Secularism in Antebellum America and their place within larger debates. There is an incredible rush that happens—excitement mixed with dread—in those moments that you realize that somebody else might know your book better than you do.

The social gospel movement in the United States began as a faith-based, grassroots movement of laity and clergy in the aftermath of the Civil War. During this era, American society faced extreme levels of social instability resulting not only from wartime trauma and loss, but also relocation of massive numbers of those emancipated from slavery, a rapidly accelerated pace of both industrialization and urbanization and unprecedented waves of immigration.