The first decades of the twentieth century were years of tremendous upheaval in the American experience of both religion and gender. Industrialization and urbanization transformed nineteenth-century understandings of masculinity and femininity, while massive immigration, debates between modernists and fundamentalists, and the diverse entertainments and opportunities of city life began to challenge the cultural preeminence of American Protestantism. Nowhere was this upheaval felt more acutely—as both an opportunity and a cause for anxiety—than among African Americans. The glowing prospect of better-paying work in the industrial North, as well as the chance to escape the most egregious racism of the Jim Crow South, lured hundreds of thousands of African Americans northward, a great tumultuous river flowing toward what seemed to be freedom.

This article analyzes the broadcast activities of the Chicago Sunday Evening Club (CSEC), a mainline Protestant organization founded in 1908 and still active today. The CSEC began broadcasting its weekly meetings on the radio in 1922 and on television in 1956. Drawing on archival organizational records from the CSEC and from listener correspondence, this essay traces how the club's use of the new media of particular historical moments shaped its history as a public entity.

This study makes two claims. First, it argues that, though evangelicals and fundamentalists took to radio and television broadcasting with greater vigor, mainline Protestant groups did as well, and the persistence of a group like the CSEC offers a way to understand the challenges that broadcasting presented to religious organizations. Second, this article shows how audience expectations for religious programming evolved from radio to television. For many listeners, radio offered what they told the CSEC was a spiritual and even miraculous experience, and they marveled at being able to tune in to religious services from their homes. Television, however, prompted remarks often focused on visual style, and the club found itself struggling to compete with the newly emerging group of religious television programs not only on denominational terms (many were evangelicals and fundamentalists) but also on aesthetic terms. In contrast to radio, as many viewers wrote to the CSEC, television seemed to provide not a singular “experience” but rather spectatorial access to events taking place elsewhere. In the context of competition from the more telegenic programming of evangelicals and fundamentalists, these shifting audience expectations shaped both the history of the CSEC as a public entity and the broader history of mainline Protestantism in the mass media.

After John Shoebridge Williams became a Spiritualist medium in February 1852, establishing what he believed to be contact with the spirit of his deceased daughter, Eliza, and access to the wisdom of the spirit world, the sixty-one-year-old man came to the startling realization that he was assuming the features of a woman. At least, this is what he thought as he recorded the events of March 15, 1852, in his spiritual Journal:

There is little reckoning with the development of religions in the United States without confronting the related processes of importation and appropriation. This article explores these processes specifically as reflected in the story of the San Francisco Zen Center. Partaking of an interpretative ethos established by the nineteenth-century Transcendentalists and refined during the 1950s “Zen boom,” the architects of the SFZC's communalism shaped this complicated tradition specifically for disaffected young practitioners seeking an experiential path beyond their middleclass, Judeo-Christian backgrounds. It was during the 1983 scandals surrounding SFZC leader, Richard Baker-roshi, that many of the interpretive lacunae—specifically, a relative inattention to ethical languages—became readily apparent. This article accounts for these scandals historically (by situating them in the history of American appropriations of Buddhism and of the religious disaffection of the post-World War II period) and theoretically (by reading the SFZC's patterns of transmission and interpretation through the category “interpretative double movement). This double movement among practitioners captures the ways in which those in search of an alternative to their religious culture impose their own idiosyncratic values onto another religious tradition, all the while remaining paradoxically within the interpretive confines of the culture they hope to escape. Reading this complicated history—including both its “scandals” and their aftermaths—through such categories sheds light on the ways in which American religious exchanges are enacted and identities constructed.

This essay seeks to recover the experiences of Catholics in the antebellum South by focusing on their relations with Protestants. It argues that, despite incidents of animosity, many southern Protestants accepted and supported Catholics, and Catholics integrated themselves into southern society while maintaining their distinct religious identity. Catholic–Protestant cooperation was most clear in the public spaces the two groups shared. Protestants funded Catholic churches, schools, and hospitals, while Catholics also contributed to Protestant causes. Beyond financial support, each group participated in the institutions created by the other. Catholics and Protestants worshipped in each other's churches, studied in each other's schools, and recovered or died in each other's hospitals. This essay explores a series of hypotheses for the cooperation. It argues that Protestants valued Catholic contributions to southern society; it contends that effective Catholic leaders demonstrated the compatibility of Catholicism and American ideals and institutions; and it examines Catholic attitudes towards slavery as a ground for religious harmony. Catholics proved themselves to be useful citizens, true Americans, and loyal Southerners, and their Protestant neighbors approvingly took note. Catholic–Protestant cooperation complicates the dominant historiographical view of interreligious animosity and offers a model of religious pluralism in an unexpected place and time.

Gustav Gottheil was a person of great influence in the development of American Reform Judaism, but his story has been largely forgotten. From 1873 to 1903, he was rabbi at Temple Emanu-El, the largest and wealthiest Reform Congregation on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. A prolific author and public teacher, he was “a striking and dominating figure … in American Judaism at large.” He was also controversial, criticized by some for his perceived openness to the ideals, institutions, and elites of American liberal Christianity. One editorialist wrote that he was “frequently accused of … ogling with Christianity, of servilely fawning upon it.” Another suggested that, when the history of American Reform Judaism was written, “ill-disposed critics [would] deny Gottheil his legitimate place,” judging that he was “dragging the congregation into … un-Jewish paths” based on his warm relations with urban Christian elites.

This essay is a study of the complex dynamics of Gustav Gottheil’s relationship to American Christianity. It argues that Gottheil believed America was in profound religious transition. In spite of the fact that American culture was dominated by Christian normativity, liberal Christians who were giving up their Trinitarian dogmas were actually becoming Reform Jews—“Modern Christianity,” he said in 1885, “is ancient Judaism.” This trajectory left him in no doubt that Reform Judaism was the “only possible religion of the American future.”

Throughout his ministry, Gottheil sought to advance the process of the conversion of American Christianity to Judaism. He entered into extensive dialogue and friendship with scores of liberal Christian leaders—the “ogling” and “fawning” for which he was criticized. His strategy was rarely to debate but, rather, to inhabit their vocabulary. He spoke the religious language of the normatively Christian American culture, affirming the cultural impulses of the Christian nationalist vision while creatively renarrating them on Jewish foundations.

When prophets are honored, it is time to be wary. Placing prophets on pedestals can be a way not only of disarming them but also of evading all the lessons they can teach. American Catholic radicals, for instance, occupy several revered niches in the history of American Catholicism. Here, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin break bread on Mott Street and milk cows on Maryfarm; there, Daniel Berrigan destroys draft records and leads G-men on a merry chase through New England. Though vilified in their times, this communion of saints now commands respect in most quarters of American Catholic intellectual life and could even constitute a Catholic wing in the pantheon of American radicalism.

The accompanying engraving [see fig. 1] appeared in a mid-nineteenth-century issue of The Ladies' Repository. Its caption, “Missionary Cemetry [sic], Fuh-Chau, China,” gives an accurate enough description of the scene. The artist even included a legend identifying the missionary wives and children whose remains the graves held. It is difficult to know exactly in what spirit The Repository presented this engraving to its subscribers. But the shady silence of the scene, like a pictorial obituary, invites reflection on both the lives and the deaths of the entombed. Significantly, like an obituary, the embrace of the trees also draws one in to reflect on one's own life and eventual death.

The study of evangelical moral reform has become one of the most fruitful areas of research in American religious history. By looking at reform, particularly voluntary societies, social and political historians have acknowledged the cultural importance of religion. Thus, nineteenth-century evangelicals have been recognized for their positive, negative, or ambiguous contributions to American society. Often with great success, historians have expounded and promoted interpretations of social control, capitalist expansionism, and neo-Marxism regarding evangelical social action. Yet, in spite of differing nuances, many of these interpretations follow much the same story line: antebellum evangelicals attempted, however nobly or misguidedly, to impose their standards of piety and morality on the American public. They feared the chaos released by the American and French revolutions.

This article places the World's Parliament of Religions in its social-political milieu of Gilded Age Chicago. It takes up the Parliament not to rehash arguments that scholars have made about its particular performance of religion but, rather, to locate its pluralist production in finer-grained material expenditures and extractions that made it possible. It tells this story through an examination of the Parliament's organizer, Charles Carroll Bonney. Employed as a federal judge in Chicago, Bonney's life reflects the coterminous boundaries of capital, state-building, and aspirations for the reconciliation of human conflict through multireligious unity. His tenure as the organizer of the Parliament, and as the President of the World Congress Auxiliary of which it was a part, was riddled by raging conflict with Chicago's union leaders, who saw the events as an indirect attack on the city's labor movement. To analyze the Parliament in light of these factors is to begin to understand the history of American religious pluralism as constituted by—and, thus, inextricable from—histories of labor, capital, and the state.

This article begins with a simple question: How did white evangelicals respond to the civil rights movement? Traditional answers are overwhelmingly political. As the story goes, white evangelicals became Republicans. In contrast, this article finds racial meaning in the places white evangelicals, themselves, insisted were most important: their churches. The task of evangelization did not stop for a racial revolution. What white evangelicals did with race as they tried to grow their churches is the subject of this article. Using the archives of the leading evangelical church growth theorists, this article traces the emergence and transformation of the Church Growth Movement (CGM). It shows how evangelistic strategies created in caste-conscious India in the 1930s came to be deployed in American metropolitan areas decades later. After first resisting efforts to bring these missionary approaches to the United States, CGM founder Donald McGavran embraced their use in the wake of the civil rights movement. During the 1970s, the CGM defined white Americans as “a people” akin to castes or tribes in the Global South. Drawing on the revival of white ethnic identities in American culture, church growth leaders imagined whiteness as pluralism rather than hierarchy. Embracing a culture of consumption, they sought to sell an appealing brand of evangelicalism to the white American middle class. The CGM story illuminates the transnational movement of people and ideas in evangelicalism, the often-creative tension between evangelical practices and American culture, and the ways in which racism inflected white evangelicals’ most basic theological commitments.

According to most historians, the majority of northern urban Catholics before Vatican II (1962–1965) were ensconced in their parish boundaries, viewing their existence through the lens of the parish and focusing the majority of their attention on matters within their particular geographic location. As African Americans moved north during the Great Migration (1910s–1960s) and the racial dynamics of cities changed, some black Catholics began to organize for what they called “interracial justice,” a term that reflected their belief that black equality would benefit African Americans and whites. This article argues that the parish boundaries paradigm for understanding Catholicism prior to the reforms of Vatican II fails to account for the efforts of black Catholics working for interracial justice. This article considers four ways black Catholic interracialists moved beyond their parish boundaries: (a) the national networks they cultivated with white priests; (b) the theological doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ they used to support their work; (c) the local relationships they developed with non-Catholics; and (d) the connections they made with young white Catholics. By advancing this argument, this essay highlights the relationship between race and religion—both how the institutional Catholic church reinforced racial hierarchies and how black Catholics leveraged their faith to tear them down. Finally, this article reorients the history of Catholic interracialism by focusing on black laypeople and connects two bodies of literature that rarely comment on one another: that of Catholicism and the long civil rights movement.

Belying assumptions about Catholics and science grounded in the old science-religion warfare model in the 1920s, two liberal Catholic intellectuals contributed in some important but overlooked ways to the discourse where prominent scientist-popularizers and other intellectuals constructed the public understanding of evolution and the Scopes Trial in the mid-1920s US. This article explores publicly-disseminated articles and archival correspondence between Catholics and non-Catholics on these topics, concluding that the manner in which the former supported evolution and opposed the Scopes prosecution may have unintentionally fostered scientism and religious modernism, rather than Catholicism, in the public square. Conditioned by their own Progressive-Era experiences and intellectual training, renowned liberal Catholics Fr. John A. Ryan, board member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Michael Williams, editor of Commonweal magazine, framed their arguments directed at non-Catholic intellectual elites almost exclusively in social and biological science to the exclusion of religion. They did so even as public intellectuals and prominent scientists of modernist faith, like Henry Fairfield Osborn of the Museum of Natural History, constructed a public image of evolution that blended religion, philosophy and science when assigning meaning to the Scopes Trial. This study broadens the view of science-religion conversations surrounding evolution in the 1920s by integrating voices usually omitted from the story while further complicating the still-resonant ‘creationist-' evolutionist’ paradigm.

Although the civil rights movement has long been framed as a pivotal turning point in twentieth-century U.S. religious history, comparatively little attention has been directed to the role of religion in what has been termed “the long segregation movement.” Likewise, Catholic historians tend to emphasize the exceptional few priests, sisters, and lay people committed to interracial justice over and against the majority of white Catholics who either opposed integration or objected to the means by which it would be achieved. This article argues that, in order to fully understand U.S. Catholicism in the twentieth century, scholars must reckon with the ways racial whiteness shaped the Catholicness of white Catholics. It takes as its primary source more than six hundred letters written by white Catholics outraged and disgusted over the Archdiocese of Chicago's apparent support for desegregation between 1965 and 1968. These letters not only illuminate the inseparability of religion and race, but they also reveal that white Catholicism itself operated as a religio-racial formation in the lives of white Catholics. Given the overwhelming white Catholic (and white religious) resistance to integration, this article argues that the long segregation movement and massive resistance to desegregation ought to be included as signal events in the telling of U.S. Catholic and U.S. religious history.

Why has Lucy Harris been blamed for the loss of 116 pages of the Book of Mormon manuscript? Analysis of storytelling about Lucy Harris, Mormonism's first “bad girl,” allows us to see the creation of one element of the Latter-day Saint chain of memory. Through the accretion of stories about Lucy Harris, church members came to code doubt as feminine in Mormon memory while viewing the concept of witness as masculine. These understandings of the relationship between gender and religious faith are embedded understandings in the Latter-day Saint chain of memory. Preserving the memory and reputation of Martin Harris, Lucy's husband, scribe for the Book of Mormon, and one of its three witnesses, allowed Latter-day Saints to cement the intersections of masculinity, priesthood, and witness. Church members used stories about Lucy Harris to teach, discipline, and perform gender norms for future generations of Mormons.

Based on ethnographic research conducted in Pittsburgh, this article examines the experiences of American-born intermarriage converts to Eastern Orthodoxy. Long characterized as a variety of Christianity fundamentally ethnic in its orientation and insular in its relationships to American religious and cultural mainstreams, Eastern Orthodoxy has attracted increasing numbers of American-born converts over the last thirty years. While the motives and perspectives of more overtly theologically driven conversions have garnered attention, intermarriage conversions are often dismissed as the natural outcomes of entering into marriage and family life. Significantly, intermarriage converts frequently stress their decisions to enter the Orthodox church as autonomously made apart from external influences.

By gauging the ways intermarriage converts are depicted in parish life as well as the motives and perspectives they themselves convey in interviews, I argue that the language and assumptions of the American spiritual marketplace profoundly influence Orthodox Christian understandings of family and religion today. Personal choice and individualism rather than the expectations of traditionally ascribed identities have come to be highly valued and valorized means of counting Orthodox identity in the United States. Yet, the prevalence of marketplace values does not diminish the emotional and social impacts of family and community for intermarriage converts. Rather, I observed a general elevation in the importance of both and a frequent substantiation of their roles as the transmitters of shared values among these individuals. Thus, this article provides a case study of how individual and familial concerns further religious choice-making.

In 1976, a young theologian named Donald Dayton wrote an influential book that sought to put asunder what he saw as an unholy marriage between evangelical religion and conservative politics in America. In Discovering an Evangelical Heritage, Dayton showed how revivalistic Protestantism had, in the nineteenth century, been wedded firmly to progressive political causes. Dayton began his book by frankly admitting that his own political views had been heavily influenced by the student movements—antiwar, civil rights, equal rights— of the 1960's. Separate chapters linked evangelical religion to nineteenth-century movements for racial equality, economic justice, and feminism. In his final chapter, Dayton argued that twentieth-century evangelicalism had abandoned its heritage of radical social reform under the dual influence of premillennialism imported from England and ideas about biblical inerrancy formulated at Princeton Seminary.

In 1958, C. Wright Mills delivered his “Pagan Sermon to the Christian Clergy,” a piece in which he challenged American churches to consider their complicity in the coming of World War III. Mills complained that “the verbal Christian belief in the sanctity of human life… does not itself enter decisively into the plans now being readied for World War III.… Total war ought indeed be difficult for the Christian conscience to confront, but the Christian way out makes it easy; war is defended morally and Christians easily fall into line—as they are led to justify it—in each nation in terms of Christian faith itself.”