Marty - American Religious History in the Eighties - A Decade of Achievement

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American Religious History in the Eighties: A Decade of Achievement

Martin E. Marty

Church History

, Vol. 62, No. 3. (Sep., 1993), pp. 335-377.

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Church History

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American Religious History in the Eighties: A Decade of Achievement 

What follows is a bibliography that is long on titles and short on adjectives;it seemed out of place for one commentator to try to discuss the pluses andminuses of so many books, not all of which he had seen; reviews ofwhich hecould not possibly all have remembered or trusted; most of which he couldnot have had time or occasion yet to read. Nevertheless, this endeavor shouldbe helpful in locating and classifying hundreds of books.These works of American religious history have in common two features.Their publication date is in the eighties of this century: 1980-1989; and theywere reviewed by at least two of the following five periodicals: ChurchHistov;its counterpart, Catholic Historical Revieu~;hird, a general religious reviewingorgan that gives generous space to history, Religzous Studies Review; and,finally, the journals of the two largest professional organizations attentive tothese subjects, the American Historical Association's The American HistoricalReview and the Organization of American Historians' The Journal

of

AmericanHisto?.The reasoning behind this mode of reckoning, though it risks overlookinga worthy book that somehow failed to come to the attention or win therecognition of those who assign reviews and those who write them, is that wewanted to pay attention to books that were beginning to or likely to becomepart of the public record. (It may be that a few books published in 1988 and1989 had not yet been reviewed by the time ofour survey through journals of1992.)A survey of this sort makes it possible to notice profiles of the work ofrecent historians of American religion.

I

hope it will be of use to researchers,to teachers who assign topics and students who pursue them, and to potentialdissertation or book writers who can here easily locate areas that received lessattention than they deserved.Let me italicize some categories that met surprising neglect. A stunner: atthe end of the ecumenical century, there were but one Catholic, one Lutheran,and one (nineteenth century) evangelical books on ecumenism and not onefrom the Protestant-Orthodox participant mainstream. There was one book

I

want to acknowledge the work of my research assistant Craig Prentiss, who carefullycarded many hundreds of titles, including many that were of no use for this essay becausethe): did not meet the criteria for comment: they received only one review.

I

also thank oureditorial assistants, Julie Crutchfield and Michele Rosenthal, and their aides Philip Harroldand David Larsen, who checked the Mart): manuscript against the Library of CongressInformation Service Data Base.

CHURCH HISTORYabout World War

I

and one about Catholic peacemaking, but otherwise

warand peace

was a neglected category in the decade following the VietnameseWar and during the ending ofthe Cold War. We have heard much about thetherapeutic revolution and obsession in the religious world; where are thehistories of

therapy

in America?More surprises: for all the talk about

New Religious Movements

or "cults" asthey are usually pejoratively called, movements that attracted so muchattention in the late 1960s and through the 1970s, historians largely left thestudy of these to sociologists. Similarly,

spirituality

came to be a topic ofintense pursuit as well as fashion and fancy in the culture at large, andcertainly has been a longtime preoccupation of historians, but it receivedlittle attention from Americanists. These are times of favor shown to "bornagain" Christianity and exuberant religion, yet there was little new work onthe history of

conversion, revivals, and awakenings

in America. The observanceof the U. S. Constitutional bicentennial and that of the Bill of Rights may haveoccasioned some writings on the

Constitutional

story, but not as much as somewould have expected, and

civil religion,

a preoccupation a decade earlier, wasalso relatively slighted in the 1980s. For that matter, while there was aconsiderable increase in the notice given women in American religion andwhile they received more attention than before in books whose titles do notsuggest a preoccupation with feminist themes, the

women-in-religion

story isjust beginning to be told. Despite the talk about multiculturalism, somecultures-Asian-and

Hispanic-American-went

almost uncovered by histori-ans. And through the years of the Reagan-Bush administrations, duringtimes of intense preoccupations with free enterprise, capitalism, marketeconomies, and the like, in their relations to religion-especially in the fieldof ethics-we could only find a couple of titles on the history of

business

andreligion.The most striking feature, and the one that produces an implicit thesis forthis introduction and the whole endeavor, is this: for all the talk about the"hegemony" of

mainstream Protestant denominations

in the eyes of historians;the historians' predilection for telling the story of "the center and not theperiphery"; the accusation that they marginalize many and assign "outsider"status to those who have not been members of that (or the Catholic)mainstream, the actual literary production of historians during the decadeshowed such prejudicing to be anything but the case. There is one bigexception: New England colonial religion, especially of the Puritan brand,attracted scores of historians, as

it

has for decades. But note how fewtitles-almost none!-there are for middle and even southern colonies. Andonce one gets to the national period, the time of the flourishing of denomina-tions, down through the present, one would have a hard time locating"mainline" or "establishment" Protestantism by tracking the historians. ThusMethodists, who down to the present make up Protestantism's second largest

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