Religion in American Life: A Short History.

Williams, Peter W.

Religion in American Life: A Short History. By Jon Butler, Grant Wacker, and Randall Balmer. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. xiv + 525 pp. $35.00 cloth.

This age in which we contemporary academics live has been one of scholarly proliferation, with monographs and articles expected for professional advancement even in institutions not previously known as centers of scholarship. Eric Segal's Jeremy Hilary Boob, Phud., in the Beatles' classic film Yellow Submarine, had it right: "Ad hoc, ad log and quid pro quo/So little time, so much to know." Today it is hard to keep up even with one's own subspecialty, let alone the discipline as a whole.

This proliferation has also led to synthesis, a fortunate development for scholars and general readers alike. And, in the realm of American religious history, one can hardly do better than Religion in American Life, the collective production of three highly regarded scholars in the field and produced by Oxford in a handsome small-page format that invites rather than discourages potential readers. Although the book is not exactly new--its three main sections are only lightly modified from their earlier appearance as separate volumes in Oxford's Religion in American Life series--their combination into a single volume, presumably aimed at an older readership than their earlier format was designed to attract, serves a useful purpose in providing a highly engaging overview of the topic for the beginning student or general reader looking for a readable and coherent narrative sprinkled with well-chosen anecdotes and illuminating illustrations.

Yale's Jon Butler is well known for his attempted deconstruction of earlier narratives of early American religious history, but he here demonstrates that he is capable of putting the pieces back together again. His opening third of the book devotes significant space to the French, Spanish, African, and native presences in colonial North America. The middle colonies are provocatively cited as the prototype of the development of the American religious trajectory following independence; although New England is less centrally positioned than in past tellings of the tale, most of the elements of the traditional narrative remain, juxtaposed with the account of popular religion that Butler has explored creatively elsewhere. Women find a significant place here, as does the interpretation of artifacts of material culture, such as houses of worship, as indicators of the role of religion in colonial life and the social status of its supporters. Butler's concluding sentence pithily sums up his take on the colonial religious heritage: "the eighteenth century witnessed the birth of important distinctive traits--denominational aggressiveness, revivalism, and women's religious activism--that typified American religion in the next three centuries" (137). An earlier generation of historians would certainly find here some things both old and new.

Grant Wacker takes on the nineteenth century with customary vigor, eloquence, and perceptiveness. Given the volume's origins, it is not surprising to find some rehashing of Butler's material, although this repetition never becomes intrusive. Wacker's main framework is the juxtaposition of evangelicals, who dominate the century, with "outsiders," which borders on becoming a residual category. He proceeds selectively, focusing on specific examples to make general points without worrying too much about including everything: for example, Jewish scholars might raise an eyebrow over the omission of the Hebrew Union College's "trayf banquet" of 1883. He also avoids for the most part the technicalities of the theological discourse that abounded during the era. His concluding chapter, "Adventurers of the Spirit," proceeds through graceful segues from topic to topic; if it raises the question of unity, the answer at least implicitly suggests itself: plurality and its encounters with an evangelical drive for hegemony are the major unifying themes of American religion in the nineteenth century (as they may be proving in the early twenty-first as well).

If Butler and Wacker write vigorously and engagingly, Randall Balmer does so afortiori in his account of the twentieth century--not surprisingly for someone who has previously written successfully on contemporary affairs for a broad audience. Like Wacker, he fashions highly diverse materials into plausible narratives in his early chapters and has an eye both for the telling anecdote and the interplay between specifically religious developments and the broader, and increasingly secular and pluralistic, American culture. (Time magazine, for example, is frequently invoked as both an interpreter of and player in religious developments under the Luce regime.) An especially nice example occurs on page 441, where he describes New Age music as "a kind of dreamy jazz that provided the sensation of drowning in a sea of marzipan."

Reviewers must periodically assert their scholarly independence by pointing out faults, and I shall therefore highlight two quibbles with Balmer's interpretation. As Patrick Henry demonstrated some time ago, Dwight Eisenhower has endlessly been quoted as saying that the American polity was based "in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is." Unfortunately, as Henry points out, no one has ever succeeded in documenting that Eisenhower actually uttered these words, which have taken on a life of their own as an academic legend. One might also object that Rosa Parks's refusal to sit in the "colored" section of the Montgomery bus was a carefully orchestrated tactic rather than a spontaneous gesture of defiance, as Balmer implies. If these are all the author's academic sins, however, he has little for which to apologize.

Religion in American Life is a good read, especially for the uninitiated. The initiated, however, might also read it for its felicity of narrative and the moments of illumination that fine scholars can inject even into stories we have all heard before. Read it.

Peter W. Williams

Miami University