Edwin Scott Gaustad (1923–2011)

Had Edwin Scott Gaustad, who died March 25, 2011, produced nothing other than the New Historical Atlas of Religion in America, as he did with Philip L. Barlow (New York, 2000), he would be remembered with gratitude by generations of historians of religion. However, he did also produce a stream of scholarly and sometimes popular works on an extraordinary variety of subjects. Some of these are regarded as landmarks in their fields.

Dr. Gaustad, the eighty-seven-year-old University of California–Riverside professor, had been one of the most familiar and engaged figures at meetings of historians of American religion until prolonged illness led him to withdraw “from the circuit,” as he called it. With his wife, Virginia, regularly at his side in academic sessions and convivial settings until illness kept her home in Riverside, Dr. Gaustad was the kind of imaginative craftsman, lecturer, critic, and conference participant who embodied faithfulness in ways that inspired students, colleagues, and a wider public and helped him serve as mentor to many younger colleagues.

Some historians serve their craft by picking a specialty and devoting decades to research and detailed writing on which others lean. Other scholars range so widely and are so productive that they sometimes inspire suspicion and criticism. “How can one scholar be anything but superficial if he or she teaches, lectures, writes, and publishes on so many topics?” Dr. Gaustad was too modest to be self-referential and to answer such a question, but the question itself needs revising, in his case: no review of his works, to my knowledge, accused him of being superficial. He loved archives and drew on original sources to create narratives and provide syntheses that endure.

Iowa-born Dr. Gaustad spent his early years in Houston and served in the military during World War II. He attended Baylor University for his BA degree and then studied under Edmund Morgan at Brown University, where he received his PhD in 1951. After 1965 he taught at University of California–Riverside until he retired in 1989. He welcomed citizen roles, including serving as expert witness on cases involving issues of separation of church and state. For example, he testified in a noted case in Alabama courts concerning the legality of a monument featuring the Ten Commandments on the state courthouse lawn. He was not a conventional scholar-activist, but his writings provided perspectives that helped legal scholars and religious leaders alike represent causes in the civic order.

The work that brought him to the attention of his peers more than a half-century ago was The Great Awakening in New England (New York, 1957). Before it made its mark, the story of conversions and revivals in colonial America had usually been seen as a set of episodes that enlivened the Protestant churches but had little larger relevance. Dr. Gaustad provided a larger context, making a major contribution on which later historians drew as they dealt with regions far beyond New England. They came to follow his arguments that, indeed, the Great Awakening was an event that colored religions beyond Protestantism and the larger culture itself. Many of these later scholars tracked Dr. Gaustad’s own subsequent work to see how people in that culture, often having to deal with religious liberty, helped the emergent United States, as James Madison put it, to relate religion to “civil authorities.” That sphere of legal and historical work later came to be called “the separation of church and state,” picking up on a term of Thomas Jefferson, to whom Dr. Gaustad also devoted book-length attention in Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson (Grand Rapids, MI, 1996).

Along the way he wrote on Roger Williams (Roger Williams, New York, 2005), a radical dissenter often regarded as a critic who helped distance churches from religious authorities and thus contributed to their vitality and the nation’s health. Dr. Gaustad’s Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation (San Francisco, 1987) was a collation of mini-biographies that dealt with how the national founders related to the civil order. The...