Mixed Blessings: Christianization and Secularization

Mark Twain’s tale of those “conglomerate twins,” Luigi and Angelo Capello, “a double-headed human creature with four arms, one body, and a single pair of legs,” is an appropriate figure for much of American religion since the Enlightenment. These extraordinary twins, Twain tells us, were terribly divided religiously. Luigi’s tastes ran to Tom Paine’s Age of Reason, pipe tobacco, rum shops, and the Freethinkers’ Society; Angelo’s to devotional classics, temperance, Methodist meetings, and eventually Baptist full immersion (a miserably wet day for Luigi). Being inseparably joined to his irreligious brother was a grievous trial to Angelo, who, in moments of deep despair, wished that “he and his brother might become segregated from each other and be separate individuals, like other men.” But then he would shudder at these dark imaginings: “To sleep by himself, eat by himself, walk by himself—how lonely, how unspeakably lonely.” A shivering at the monstrosity of manly isolation, Angelo’s quavering was also a recognition that evangelicalism and the Enlightenment, modern religion and natural philosophy, were so bound together that their separation could hardly be conceived. Angelo was stuck with Luigi, and vice versa. Such intense intertwining is especially foregrounded in James Gilbert’s Redeeming Culture, but the question of Christianization and secularization is also the one issue that echoes time again through New Directions in American Religious History, a formidable collection of seventeen historiographical essays edited by Harry S. Stout and D.G. Hart.

The title for the Stout and Hart collection, probably reflective more of a marketer’s design than the editors’ intentions, is at odds with much of what the editors want to achieve. Theirs is an appeal for traditionalism, for core questions, for the anchor of a canon, against the fragmentation and disarray of academic novelty and fashion. The field of American religious history, however rich its current historiography, is seen as “rudderless in its overall direction or sense of professional priorities,” full of “agitation and motion,” but “with few common destinations” (p. 5). Beyond the introduction, the opening essay by Harry S. Stout and Robert M. Taylor, “Studies of Religion in American Society: The State of the Art,” is where these critical themes are most fully broached. A substantial review of the broad shape of the historiography of American religion, especially over the last quarter century, the essay makes the case (through survey data) that historians of American religion have lost the sense of their own past as an interpretive community, that theirs is a subfield without “a common canon” and “classic texts” (pp. 23, 32). At bottom, the authors’ measurements of decentering leave them “with a feeling of profound unease, a feeling of frustration” over the absence of shared theoretical and historiographic concerns (p. 32). Stout and Taylor look to a convergence of history and sociology, especially on the question of secularization, as one source of salvation, though arguably it is the meeting of history and cultural anthropology that has done more to redirect the field in the last fifteen years (an intersection that hovers mostly in the shadows in this collection, but stands out clearly in David D. Hall’s essay on Puritanism).

Moving into the body of historiographic essays that range from Christianizing the South (Donald G. Mathews) to gender, sexuality, and Protestantism (Susan Juster) to African-American religious traditions (Judith Weisenfeld) to the study of Protestant foreign missions since World War II (Dana L. Robert), it is hard not to be highly impressed with the sure-footedness and acuity of these overviews. It is also hard, though, not to see a set of canonical questions still in place, however blurred they might be around the edges. For starters, Protestantism occupies an undoubted center as the book’s main organizing divisions make clear: “Protestantism and Region,” “The Stages of American Protestantism...