Theology Today - Vol 34, No. 4 - January 1978 - BOOK REVIEW - A History of the Churches in the United States and Canada

475 - A History of the Churches in the United States and Canada

A History of the Churches in the United States and Canada
By Robert T. Handy
New York, Oxford University Press, 1977. 471 pp. $19.95.

Professor Robert T. Handy has been teaching the history of modern Christianity at Union Theological Seminary in New York for a quarter century. In that period he has issued a stream of articles, monographs, and broader studies while also editing, revising, and reissuing out of print materials. A History of the Churches in the United States and Canada is a major summary volume, and it will clearly become a standard church historical survey. Formally considered, this book is the inaugural volume in a significant new series edited by Henry and Owen Chadwick, The Oxford History of the Christian Church. It both establishes the seriousness of the series and sets high standards for succeeding volumes (projected to reach a total of twenty). For the purposes of current review, however, the book now stands alone and must be approached without the benefit of comparison with other volumes in the series. This review will describe the book and discuss its special characteristics before making some comments about its relationship to other widely used works.

The most important observation with respect to the book is that it concerns the Christian tradition as it has taken shape in current English-speaking North America. A central purpose is the comparison and contrast between "American" and "Canadian" traditions and experiences. The author has opted for a mixed approach to this question. The early materials, roughly through 1720, are laid out in comparative terms through discussion of the different European approaches to the North American continent as a whole. The development of the separate modern nations was yet to come, and there is a certain arbitrariness in writing history as though future configurations already dominated the originating epoch. In the last section of the book, discussion of American and Canadian materials of the last fifty years (roughly since World War I) is joined, permitting useful atten-

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tion to parallels and divergences. For fully three-quarters of the study, however, covering the formative and central periods in American and Canadian history (1720-1920), the author considers each national tradition separately, allowing himself summary paragraphs of comparison passim. All things considered, the wisdom in opting for this strategy will be established for most readers, although it does mean that the urgency of comparative studies of a somewhat different sort was avoided. This alternative strategy would have involved comparative studies based upon more systematic concern with theoretical questions, such as the relationship between religious traditions and the formation of nations or the patterns of the transformation of religion in ethnically plural societies.

A second important observation about the book is that its subject matter is determined by commitment to study of the Christian churches. While not narrowly ecclesiological in focus, the central interest is in the Christian tradition through its institutional expression. Important individuals do emerge as personalities, but chiefly in relationship to their various roles in their traditions. To be sure, groups marginal to modern Christianity, for example, the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, or Jewish denominations, receive informed and careful attention. Very little notice is taken, on the other hand, of religious groups or materials decisively unrelated to the Christian community. The subject matter, then, is the inclusive Christian tradition and not religion in North America.

Within the inclusive tradition, the author is sensitive to righting some historiographical imbalances; an example is in giving substantial attention to the experience of black Christianity in its relationship to white experience. Another example is sympathetic discussion of sectarian expressions of Christianity as deserving of the attention formerly accorded to only the more settled churches and developed communions. Intellectual aspects of the tradition are reviewed, but the emphasis falls upon their influence in the shaping of its institutions. Less attention is given to their relationship to the history of Christian thought on the one hand or the contemporary culture on the other.

A History of the Churches in the United States and Canada invites comparison with other recent summary volumes. Less than half the bulk of Sydney Ahlstrom's A Religious History of the American People, Handy's study is more oriented toward the institutional, less to the cultural and intellectual. But while narrower in focus (centering on the Christian churches) than Ablstrom's work, it has an explicit comparative dimension in contrast to the fascination with uniqueness which pervades Ahlstrom's work. Finally, Handy's volume is less burdened with the sense that a "puritan era" has definitively ended and a post-puritan one begun.

The new study is more comparable in size and scale to Winthrop Hudson's Religion in America (second edition, 1972). Handy's does center more explicitly on the Christian tradition in its range and vitality, an emphasis enhanced by its comparative component.

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Conversely, America as a cultural setting is much less the obvious center of the new Oxford history-and churchly questions lie explicitly at the center of it.

Summary volumes are by definition open to criticism from those whose favorite topics seem to have been inadequately covered. Putting aside any comments which might be made in this spirit, I think this study will prove to be a judicious and inclusive volume, especially in light of its useful notes, excellent bibliography, and full index. It certainly will have great utility in presenting North American Christianity to non-Americans, and it should prove to have wide use in church and seminary circles. Above all, like many volumes in Oxford series, it may well soon be taken as the "standard" account. Professor Handy deserves our congratulations as well as our appreciation for this excellent first volume in an important new series.

John F. Wilson
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey