118 - Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the Present

Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the Present

Edited by Mark A. Noll

New York, Oxford University Press, 1990. 401 Pp. $32.50; $13.95 (Paper).

This is a superb collection of essays. The volume grew out of a conference at Wheaton College, sponsored by the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicalism. The authors, however, are drawn from the ranks of excellent scholars regardless of their own confessional tradition. The origins of the volume do bear testimony to the flowering of evangelical scholarship during the last decade, especially in American religious history.

Generalizations about collected essays are difficult, but there are three noteworthy characteristics of this work. First, the essays demonstrate the central importance of religion in American political life, not only during the colonial period where its influence has long been recognized, but also during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Religion shaped political parties and institutions as well as political ideas and behavior.

Second, the most interesting new work on religion and American politics is being done on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not the colonial period which has been mined so thoroughly for so long.

Third, what seems to be emerging is a recognition of the continuities in American religious and political history, rather than the radical disjunctions. Separation of church and state did not produce a divorce between religion and politics, and the continuing interaction of religion and political life is an essential theme of American history. This, in turn, raises serious questions about theories of secularization and modernization in American society. Anyone who wants a description of "the state of art" in historical scholarship on American religion and politics must begin with this book.

John M. Mulder, Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Louisville, Ken.