This article argues that Christian beliefs and concerns shaped the political culture of anti-nuclear activism in the early years of the Cold War. It focuses in particular on the origins of the Peacemakers, a group founded in 1948 by a mostly Protestant group of radical pacifists to oppose conscription and nuclear proliferation. Like others who came of age in the interwar years, the Peacemakers questioned the Enlightenment tradition, with its emphasis on reason and optimism about human progress, and believed that liberal Protestantism had accommodated itself too easily to the values of modern, secular society. But rather than adopt the “realist” framework of their contemporaries, who gave the United States critical support in its Cold War with the Soviet Union, radicals developed a politics of resistance rooted in a Christian framework in which repentance for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the first step toward personal and national redemption. Although they had scant influence on American policymakers or the public in the early years of the Cold War, widespread opposition to nuclear testing and U.S. foreign policy in the late 1950s and 1960s launched them into leadership roles in campaigns for nuclear disarmament and peace.

A full-page ad in the September 30, 1946, issue of Life magazine shows a picture of a book called Peace of Mind being handed down from above by a male hand. “This New Best Seller,” the caption reads, “will help you find the happiness you have always sought.” Life readers may have wondered if the hand was supposed to be the author's, the publisher's, or the Lord's, but, in any case, it would have been Jewish. The author was a rabbi, the publisher was Simon and Schuster, and the God in question was the God of Moses rather than Jesus. The mysterious hand might have belonged to yet another Jew, as the book was the first religious best-seller to endorse Freud. In the advertisement, Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport testified that author Joshua Loth Liebman “shatters the long-standing myth that religion and psychology are necessary antagonists [and] proves that they converge upon a single goal—the enhancement of man's peace of mind.”

In 1949, the critic and controversialist Paul Blanshard launched a broadside attack on the Catholic hierarchy in the United States with the publication of American Freedom and Catholic Power, his harshly critical exploration of the Catholic church's involvement in American public life. An instant best-seller, American Freedom and Catholic Power went through eleven printings in its first year and continued to draw new readers throughout the 1950s. Blanshard's mission was to alert Americans to the movements of a Catholic hierarchy that was becoming, he charged, “more and more aggressive in extending the frontiers of Catholic authority into the fields of medicine, education, and foreign policy.” He reserved some of his most stinging commentary for the church's intrusion into the world of medicine.

In the years after 1965, a new wave of Asian, Latino, Caribbean, and African immigrants has transformed and revitalized the religious landscape of many U.S. cities. This essay explores the transformation of Christianity in greater Boston, where new immigrants replenished ailing congregations and infused them with new religious and social practices. This de-Europeanization of Christianity was not simply a result of transnational practices but resulted from a collaborative process between immigrants and native-born religious institutions. Both Catholic and Protestant churches experienced this immigrant-based revitalization, but evangelical Protestants have been particularly adept at partnering with newcomers to promote a “quiet revival” of urban Christianity.

In recent years, historians have turned their attention to the continued presence of Native Americans living “behind the frontier” in eighteenth-century New England. Where a previous generation of scholars once wrangled over the benignity of seventeenth-century Puritan “praying towns” and equated conversion with cultural suicide, current studies of Native religion in the decades preceding the American Revolution suggest that Indians preserved traditional culture by grafting Christianity onto a preexisting grid of beliefs and practices. A case study based on the writings of a lay missionary and civil magistrate named Josiah Cotton, this essay contributes to revisionist scholarship by examining Native American spirituality under the broader and more inclusive category of popular religion. Most Wampanoag families in New England's “Old Colony” lived between cultures—neither fully integrated into English society nor fully traditional in their identities or worldview. The ambiguities of their colonial situation, in turn, facilitated the emergence of a diverse spectrum of religious beliefs and practices that, at times, transcended racial categories. English settlers consulted Native American shamans and cunning folk; rumors of witchcraft, ghosts, and spirits permeated all ranks of society; and Indians and their white neighbors shared a preoccupation with spiritual healing. A few core families aspired to all the trappings of English life; they internalized Puritan doctrine, engaged in sophisticated devotional routines, and joined local Indian churches. Others continued to live in traditional ways and simply ignored the pastoral labors of regional missionaries. But for the majority of Native Christians who lived and worked side-by-side with their English neighbors, religion remained an eclectic affair as they deployed a variety of spiritual resources to combat the vicissitudes and uncertainties of everyday life.

Martin Luther King, Jr., gazes serenely, almost expressionless, in a somber suit and tie before a backdrop of prison bars. Around his neck hangs a booking number, “7089.” Around his head is a brilliant golden halo. The picture is not a mug shot but an icon in the Byzantine tradition. It is, as its Greek inscription says, “Holy Martin.” St. Martin Luther King.

This icon is a popular piece of merchandise for a mail-order Company in Vermont. Each January, just before King's birthday they receive a flood of Orders. This phenomenon is an enigma, the fountainhead for a flood of questions. How can a black Baptist minister become the subject of a popular icon? What in American society and culture fostered its creation? Who invokes this great civil rights leader as a saint? But the most basic question is, how can Martin Luther King be considered a saint in the first place? Was it simply because he was slain for the cause of civil rights? Others died for the cause, and there are no icons of them.

During much of the twentieth Century, adoption has relied on the paradoxical theory that differences are managed best by denying their existence. According to the “matching” paradigm that has governed modern adoption, adults who acquire children born to others must look, feel, and behave as if they had given birth themselves. In spite of intensive efforts to erase distinction, distinction endures as an obvious characteristic of kinship outside of blood. The fact that adoption is a different way to make a family has profoundly shaped popular attitudes and professional policies. The fact that adoptive families are “made up” is surely one of the most interesting and important things about how such families come to be.

How one should classsify religious groups in the United States is a persistent question. The necessity for some sort of classification system is obvious: the vast diversity of religion in the United States requires that we be able to bring order out of what would otherwise be sheer chaos. At the same time, the pluralism that raises the issue in the first place makes the development of an adequate method of classification difficult. Both the historic Judeo-Christian mainstream and the alternatives to it that have emerged throughout our history must be given their due in a way that obscures the importance of neither one.

The past thirty years have been a watershed in Mexican American literature, witnessing the proliferation of texts with increasingly diverse themes. For the most part, this literary production has been motivated by the impulse to narrate the stories that typify Mexican cultural history in the United States.

This essay explores the political origins and implications of Beat Zen anarchism, a cultural phenomenon located in the intersection between American anarchist traditions and Zen Buddhism in the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Focusing on the writings of D. T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen, it shows how Beat Zen emerged not primarily from an Orientalist appropriation of “the East” but rather from an Occidentalist, Japanese-centered criticism of American materialism that followed from the complex legacy of the World’s Parliament of Religions at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. In staking their claims to Zen, in other words, Philip Whalen and Gary Snyder—the Beat poets on whom this essay focuses—along with Alan Watts expressed the views not of cultural imperialists, as one might suppose, but of converts to what they regarded as a superior way of life.

The Beat adoption of Zen intersected with a broadly libertarian and specifically anarchist social milieu in San Francisco that congregated around Kenneth Roxroth's Libertarian Club and Anarchist Circle. The individualist, anti-statist, and anarchist political outlooks of Beat Zen anarchists were directly confirmed by the writings of D. T. Suzuki, who presented Zen as a practice of personal liberation from cultural conditioning. Suzuki's rhetorical approach—which treated Japanese Zen as both a pinnacle of Asian civilization and a key to the liberation of Western humanity from its stifling and destructive rationalism—was informed by Meiji-era Japanese nationalism and exceptionalism and by the universalism that Buddhist missionaries brought to their explanations of Zen to Westerners. Arguing that Beat Zen poets, in adopting Buddhism as it was presented to them, were foremost Occidentalist rather than Orientalist in outlook, this essay concludes that the Beat Zen anarchist cultural formation suggests a libertarian alternative to Orientalism and also reconfigures common conceptions of American radical literary history as primarily Marxistinflected.

This essay examines the response of Catholics—both the institutional church and blue-collar laity—to the turmoil of the late 1930s and the rise of the United Automobile Workers in Detroit. It critiques an influential line of scholarship that holds that the ethnic working class was effectively secularized by the rise of mass culture, the welfare state, and industrial unions. Instead, the essay argues that religion—like class, gender, or race/ethnicity—might fruitfully be analyzed as a “consciousness” and, as such, remains fluid, malleable, and protean in the face of historical change. During the Depression years, blue-collar Catholics (especially Catholic men) experienced a re-creation of their religious consciousness to conform to the new world of industrial unionism. While Detroit’s “labor priests” established the Archdiocesan Labor Institute (ALI) and hosted labor schools in parishes across the city, lay people, spurred by the movement for “Catholic Action,” founded the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU) to strengthen working-class faith and “Christianize the UAW.” More important, the ALI and ACTU collectively provided a new religious template within which working-class Catholics might reconcile—even intertwine—their class, gender, and religious identities. While the changes of the 1930s did assimilate ethnic Catholics more fully into the secular sphere, this essay demonstrates that such a process did not result in a “decline” in religious significance for many Catholic workers; more precisely, it meant a “re-making” of religious consciousness.

This essay traces the evolution of a specific tradition of prophecy interpretation in U.S. pentecostal-charismatic circles, which I dub the “prophetic politics of dominion.” From the start, this strain of pentecostal-charismatic religiosity merged transnational sensibilities with dominion-style language but typically shied away from overt political organization. Building on Israel-themed symbols and ideas acquired from nineteenth-century evangelical prophecy interpretation, a small but influential group of white proto-pentecostals and early pentecostals embraced a distinctive set of eschatological teachings known as British Israelism and its attendant literal racial identification of Anglo-Saxons with Jews. Such emphases bolstered a conviction that spirit-empowered Christians would exert significant influence on global politics prior to the Second Coming of Jesus. In the ensuing decades, a vocal minority of notable pentecostals and their charismatic successors kept alive similar emphases even as they eschewed the highly racialized conceptions of pentecostal connections to the “Lost Tribes of Israel.” More comfortable employing Christian millennial tropes than engaging pragmatic politics, these figures, nevertheless, anticipated the rapid Christianization of society and their own ascendance to positions of spiritual and temporal power in preparation for Christ's return. All the while, Israel-centric symbols and identities remained central. The crystallization of this transnational, dominion-now tradition, with its unique Israel-centric emphases and millennial motifs, represented one of the most significant—and most misunderstood—contributions to evangelical politics by U.S. pentecostals and charismatics over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Religion and spirituality are present in many organizations in the contemporary United States. While religious studies scholars have traditionally focused on local congregations, some are branching out to explore religion in a broader range of public institutions. Between 1950, when many scholars conceptualized American religion in terms of Will Herberg's classic Protestant-Catholic-Jew and the present, chapels in public institutions including the military, healthcare centers, universities, prisons and airports have expanded and diversified. I focus on airports tracing the evolution of airport chapels from Catholic centered to more multi-faith to more religiously inclusive as unlikely, or perhaps just hidden, analytic mirrors for demographic and cultural changes in American religion. Theoretically, these chapels are case studies that show how the function and appropriate place for religion in public institutions has been improvised and negotiated locally. The clergy, airport personnel and airport chaplains who make decisions about these spaces lack consistent education about the topic and receive inconsistent guidance from laws and policies across city, state, and federal contexts. The chapel spaces that result are, therefore, much more varied than one might expect and shaped as much by fears about what could cause conflict as by responses to actual conflicts.

The Christian Century is generally regarded as the most influential Protestant magazine of the early twentieth century. But what does it mean to call the Century influential? Whom did it influence, and how? This article takes a historical approach, examining the size of the Century's audience, the nature of the magazine's impact on its readers, and the ability of those readers to extend the magazine's impact beyond themselves. The main source for this investigation is a cache of more than 2,100 unpublished letters collected in 1928 to celebrate Charles Clayton Morrison's twentieth anniversary as editor. In subscribers' own words, the letters illustrated the Century's role as a crucial link among readers with similar backgrounds and aspirations, as well as the limits of its reach beyond this cohort. The article argues that the Century was influential, but not because it converted (directly or through its clergy readers) large numbers of American Protestants to its progressive vision for Christianity. Rather, the Century was primarily influential in the process of mainline identification, both in the sense of defining which writers, institutions, and ideas belonged to the emerging mainline tradition and in the sense of offering readers an opportunity to identify with that tradition. A better understanding of the Century's influence during the Morrison era sheds light on the rise of the mainline. Additionally, a better understanding of the kinds of influence magazines do and do not exercise is helpful for anyone who looks to periodicals to provide a barometer of cultural trends.

With many theories about the rise of Mormonism, this article turns to early Mormonism's growth in the Delaware Valley for insights. By testing the relative wealth of the converts, this article argues that Mormon conversion was not a product of deprivation as the converts tested were somewhat wealthier than their neighbors and were drawn from across the socioeconomic spectrum. Instead of appealing to the dispossessed, Mormonism offered a radical supernatural biblical message that appealed to certain cultural and religious orientations. Mormonism was successful among Methodists in central New Jersey, whose religious practice was still full of the enthusiasm common to Methodism's early years in America. Many of these Methodists saw Mormon supernaturalism as a welcome addition to their experience, while the considerably more formal Methodists on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware were much less receptive to Mormonism. A Quaker heritage among the converts was common on both sides of the river. The converts were principally not practicing Quakers but still maintained aspects of their heritage and were, thus, termed “hickory” Quakers. Such individuals were common in the Delaware Valley since so many Quaker's had been cut off from the fold largely resulting from the mid-eighteenth-century Quaker reformation that reinstituted strict guidelines on the membership. Yet, the reformation did not reinstitute the enthusiasm of the Quakers’ early years that had been lost after its first generation. The lapsed Quakers who were drawn to Mormonism's supernatural worldview had a romantic inherited memory of Quakerism's origins and were eager to join a religion that manifested the fervor of Quakerism's origins. Thus, Mormonism was congenial to both these kinds of religious radicalism.

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison are frequently identified as the framers of the religion clauses in the First Amendment, thus making their efforts to establish religious freedom in colonial Virginia relevant to the Constitution's meaning. This interpretive approach first appeared in a Supreme Court opinion in 1878 when Chief Justice Morrison Waite applied the religion clauses to the case of a Mormon official prosecuted under a federal antipolygamy law. For historical background, Justice Waite studied books by church historians Robert Reid Howison and Robert Baylor Semple. There, he encountered narratives of the political activism of the Baptists and Presbyterians who, in conjunction with the efforts of Madison and Jefferson, were responsible for Virginia's statutory commitment to religious freedom. The Chief Justice then grafted Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments and Jefferson's now-famous “wall of separation” letter onto the Constitution's bare text, an emendation that has endured for well over a century. Church historians Semple and Howison, and the pivotal role they played in the foundation of First Amendment jurisprudence, have been essentially lost from the historiographical record of church-state relations in America, a situation this article seeks to remedy.

This article describes the fluidity of evangelical gender ideology during the 1970s and posits that belief in male headship became one of the distinct marks of evangelical identity in the late 1970s and early 1980s. At that time, the Christian Right led a campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment, arguing that the ERA was the means by which feminists were seeking to destroy the family. It became politically expedient for evangelicals to assert their support for male headship over and against a feminist paradigm of the family. In the 1990s and 2000s, as evangelicals had begun to feel less animosity towards feminism and had actually absorbed many feminist assumptions, the Christian Right's campaign against gay marriage gave evangelicals a new reason to cling to the ideology of male headship. The campaigns against the ERA and gay marriage have made evangelicals aware of the very real presence of different models of family in American society. This awareness has enhanced commitment to the headship model of marriage.

Historians Betty DeBerg and Margaret Bendroth have done much to point historians to the way in which gender ideology has been important to evangelical identity over the last century. By analyzing anti-ERA and anti-gay marriage evangelical literature, this article argues that gender ideology was integral to the formation of evangelical identity during the last third of the twentieth century. Thus, the article seeks to extend the argument of DeBerg and Bendroth into the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s and to present gender ideology as a key feature in defining twentieth-century American evangelicalism.

During the 1930s and 1940s, the Great Depression and the rise of communism and fascism in Europe convinced a broad spectrum of Americans that they were living through a prolonged “crisis of civilization” with real potential to destroy all they held dear. Meanwhile, they saw evidence that these global problems put young people especially at risk for immorality, loss of hope, and political subversion. Because the “youth problem” and the “world crisis” seemed to be inextricably linked, even the everyday behaviors of young people took on a heightened political significance in the eyes of many adults. Christian leaders from across the spectrum of churches—Mainline Protestant, Evangelical, Roman Catholic, and African American—did not just capitalize on this obsession with youth and the fate of civilization; they did all they could to fan those flames. They did so not cynically, but sincerely, believing that they could and should save the world by saving American youth. Yet these leaders were also making a bid for influence in American society and for control of the future of their churches. The resulting politicized views of youth and youth work would not only influence the outcomes of internal church battles, but they would also shape how various Christian groups responded to the Cold War.

Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899–1974) emerged within the jazz profession as a prominent exponent of Harlem Renaissance racial uplift ideals about incorporating African American culture into artistic production. Formed in the early twentieth century's middle-class black Protestant culture but not a churchgoer in adulthood, Ellington conveyed a nostalgic appreciation of African American Christianity whenever hewrote music to chronicle African American history. This prominent jazz musician's religious nostalgia resulted in compositions that conveyed to a broader American audience a portrait of African American religiosity that was constantly “classical” and static—not quite primitive, but never appreciated as a modern aspect of black culture.

This article examines several Ellington compositions from the late 1920s through the 1960s that exemplify his deployment of popular representations of African American religious belief and practice. Through the short film Black and Tan in the 1920s, the satirical popular song “Is That Religion?” in the 1930s, the long-form symphonic movement Black, Brown and Beige in the 1940s, the lyricism of “Come Sunday” in the 1950s, and the dramatic prose of “My People” in the 1960s, Ellington attempted to capture a portrait of black religious practice without recognition of contemporaneous developments in black Protestant Christianity in the twentieth century's middle decades. Although existing Ellington scholarship has covered his “Sacred Concerts” in the 1960s and 1970s, this article engages themes and representations in Ellington's work prefiguring the religious jazz that became popular with white liberal Protestants in America and Europe. This discussion of religious narratives in Ellington's compositions affords an opportunity to reflect upon the (un)intended consequences of progressive, sympathetic cultural production, particularly on the part of prominent African American historical figures in their time. Moreover, this article attempts to locate the jazz profession as a critical site for the examination of racial and religious representation in African American religious history.