The American Religious Experience: A Concise History (review)

The paperbound edition of this book is clearly intended for classroom use and should do well in that setting. It is, to be sure, "a concise history," and could be even more concise if repetitions, especially in the early chapters, were eliminated. Also, for the sake of concision, digressions into immigration history and world religions could be eliminated or abbreviated, as well as biographical sketches that divert attention from the main topic.

In most of the chapters, the author is reluctant to stand as her own authority. She takes cover under the word "considered," for example, the Bay Psalm Book is "considered the first book of any kind printed on American soil" (p. 17), or John Wesley "often considered the founder of the Methodists" (p. 23). In one brief paragraph (p. 23), the word "considered appears four times. The author needs to pronounce and defend her own judgments.

After some early chapters devoted largely to colonial America, the author follows a topical outline that moves much closer to the present. She gives fair treatment to the Amish and the Mennonites, for example, as well as the Quakers and Shakers. In Chapter 8, "Bacon, Swedenborg, and Transcendental-ism," she provides more attention to Henry David Thoreau and John Muir than one might normally expect. Chapter 9 offers excellent treatment of anti-Catholicism in the nineteenth century, but stops short of the twentieth, thereby missing such fine opportunities as Al Smith and John Kennedy.

Chapter 10 on American Judaism, in contrast, does give ample attention to the twentieth century. A chapter on the transformation from established Anglicanism to free market Episcopalianism is well done, though some attention to Jefferson's Statute on Religious Freedom (1786) would have helped explain the necessity of this transition. Chapter 11 on "Lutherans, Germans, and Scandinavians" follows as best one can the many divisions in that denominational family based on ethnicity, theology, language, or geography, or some combination thereof. The author addresses the twentieth-century efforts to sharply reduce these many fragmentations.

In the "Evolution of the Black Church" (Chapter 13), Professor Bridgers carefully describes the creation of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816 and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in 1821. Unaccountably, however, she provides no comparable discussion of the much larger black Baptist bodies, the National Baptist Convention of the U.S.A. (1880), and a similarly named Convention organized in 1915. Chapter 14 focuses its attention more exclusively on "Baptists and Baptism," though again no significant attention is given to the black Baptists.

Remaining chapters treat a wide array of subjects: Pentecostalism, Hispanics, Native Americans, Mormons, as well as Chinese and Japanese immigrants with accompanying religious affinities. Her final chapter, "Pluralism and Periphery," begins with welcome attention to William James and W. E. B. DuBois, then moves to reflections on unity and diversity, along with Americans' embrace of the practical over the abstract. "American religion," she writes, "demands a vibrancy that recognizes the importance of personal religious experience and creates channels through which the individual can share that religious experience with others" (p. 237). All of this provides much life and color to the "American religious landscape," to use one of the author's favorite phrases. Students should find here much to inform and entertain them.