Has anyone ever collected predictions of the future of religion, whether in a book or a website? The most famous are those that predict the vast growth or decline of some faith, projections that prove to be hilariously inaccurate – eg Thomas Jefferson’s view from 1822 that Unitarians would become the dominant religion in the new United States: I rejoice that in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief, which has surrendered its creed and conscience to neither kings... Read more
Most semesters, I teach a course my university titled “Religions of the West.” Given my own background of research and writing, I at first considered pretending that the “West” meant the “American West” and having my students discuss Native American spirituality, Spanish missions, and Mormonism. Alas, “Religions of the West” meant the broader histories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Sigh. Lots of work. But that’s why humanities professors get paid the big bucks. Now, several years in, I’ve at least... Read more
Jimmy Carter’s born-again credentials drew many evangelicals to the polls in 1976. Evangelicals who had never campaigned for a candidate campaigned for Carter. Jerry Falwell, future founder of the Moral Majority, encouraged evangelicals to vote for the Democratic candidate. Pat Robertson, who claimed credit for Carter’s win in the Pennsylvania primary, hosted the candidate on his “700 Club” television show. Decades later he would say that “Carter was the one who activated me and a lot of others. We had... Read more
I recently read Yuval Levin’s engaging The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left. This book is a great example of how good writers can bring high-level intellectual history to a general audience. Levin shows how Paine defended revolutions (both American and French) that he saw as aligning with natural rights, while Burke preferred incremental reforms that respected tradition and protected mediating institutions like families, churches, and towns. Burke warned that attempts to transform... Read more
Commencement-address season is upon us, bringing glad tidings about the power of grads—especially young women–to change the world. We live in a time of great global advocacy for girls’ education, purported to be a game-changer on many grounds. The education of young women is praised for lowering birthrates, for improving health, for advancing peace (girls’ education being the bugbear of underdevelopment and extremism), for helping economies. This enthusiasm is hardly unprecedented. The history of American schooling counts many champions of... Read more
Whatever happened to America’s crusades? Once upon a time, crusades were an integral part of American rhetoric, indicating a noble or righteous struggle inspired by higher motives. All sorts of political causes were “crusades”, not to mention the overtly military ones. You actually could write an excellent history of American religion and reform through the lens and language of crusade. The Temperance movement had its crusades, women crusaded for the vote, and the Purity Crusade was a key force in... Read more
Several years ago, my co-blogger Philip Jenkins penned a thoughtful post on Protestant iconoclasm, its centrality to the Reformation, and its resemblance to Muslim iconoclasm. The “stripping of the altars,” to borrow Eamon Duffy’s phrase, was — per Jenkins — “one of the greatest catastrophes that ever befell Europe.” No argument here. Still, in Deborah Shuger’s anthology of Religion in Early Stuart England, I recently came across a discussion of religious imagery in John Dod’s 1603 A Plain and Familiar... Read more
If you are ever in the neighborhood on Lower Thames Street, I urge you to stop and take a peek inside the church of St. Magnus the Martyr. On the east wall, near the altar, stands a 19th-century dedicatory plaque marking the remains of Miles Coverdale. A former rector at St. Magnus, Coverdale is best known for his English Bible translation printed in 1535. As the inscription reads: “TO THE MEMORY OF MILES COVERDALE: WHO, CONVINCED THAT THE PURE WORD OF... Read more
One of the most surprising revelations to me during my research for my new book American Colonial History was just how much Africans dominated transatlantic immigration from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Sure, I knew that millions of Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas during that period. But the actual numbers, especially in comparison to that of European immigration, are stunning. The latest statistics on the transatlantic slave trade tell us that about eleven million Africans disembarked in... Read more
We hear a lot these days about the growth of the “Nones,” people who refuse to declare an affiliation with any particular religious tradition. Never, though, confuse that caution about affiliation with a rejection of a religious or spiritual world-view. That point is underlined by a recent study by Jeff Levin on “Prevalence and Religious Predictors of Healing Prayer Use in the USA,” in the Journal of Religion and Health, a piece that has been gaining a lot of media... Read more
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