Religion, Culture, and Politics in the Twentieth-Century United States (review)

Mark Hulsether announces that he has "two main goals" for this book: it is "a brief orientation to U.S. religion, integrated into conversations in American Studies" (13). To meet those goals Hulsether invites readers to imagine the book as "a reconnaissance map for travelers" (4). As with any journey, the traveler cannot see everything along the way, and the author promises only to tour "some representative cities and landmarks" (2). This is one book, however, that delivers more than it promises.

Hulsether manages to meet the first goal—to introduce the main "players" and "themes" in U.S. religion—remarkably well. He surveys developments before the twentieth century in chapter one. Then, using a highly effective organizational scheme, the author divides the remaining chapters into two main sections, focusing respectively on 1900 to 1945 and 1945 to the present. The structure of each is parallel, with the initial chapter offering a historical overview of the period and the following two chapters considering "social conflicts" and "cultural aspects."

In accord with his second goal, the book also presents this overview in a way that engages discussions in American studies and cultural studies. Both fields, he suggests, underemphasize religion. American studies "often treats religion as a marginal factor that appears—if at all—near the end of lists beginning with race, class, gender, and empire," and "cultural studies is even less likely to focus on religion" (12). To raise religion's profile in these scholarly circles, the author sometimes directly addresses how American studies scholars have ignored evidence of religious influence, as Hulsether does in a discussion of popular culture (119). In general, however, this second goal—to convince American studies and cultural studies scholars to consider religion—is addressed by focusing on an orienting theme that many in those fields might welcome. As opposed to a "consensus model" or a "pluralist model," Hulsether adopts a "hegemony model" (238). In a choice that seems well-suited for his imagined audience, he focuses on religious negotiations for social power in the public arena and emphasizes the themes of "hegemony" and "counter-hegemony." He argues that religions have both supported hegemony, "the dominant patterns of behavior considered 'normal,'" and also have led in the struggle against that "exercise of power through consent without coercion" (11-12).

This thematic emphasis is more than just a pragmatically chosen rhetorical strategy, and Hulsether's commitments surface in a few passages, as when he compares nineteenth-century slavery and contemporary social patterns: ". . . the social order in today's America is also maintained quite violently—in this case through the discipline of the market and prison system" (27). His moral commitment to the hegemonic model is clear by the end. That focus on "hegemonies and counter-hegemonies" is especially important, the author suggests, "in cases where suffering or oppression is acute," and "there are many places on the U.S. religious landscape where the priority is to focus on acute oppression and on how religion can help underdogs survive and overcome it" (239-40).

Readers who prefer other themes (e.g., popular piety) or privilege other sites (e.g., domestic spaces), as well as those who emphasize religion's meaning-making role more than its power-wielding function, might be somewhat less enthusiastic. But most scholars in American studies will welcome this comprehensive introduction, a volume that is accessible enough to use in the undergraduate classroom. It is a remarkably lucid and consistently judicious survey that draws on the relevant secondary literature. As Hulsether had hoped, it makes a strong case that religion should be added to race, class, gender, and empire as central categories for those who study the twentieth-century U.S.