A generation ago, church history was the trending topic in American religious history books, with Protestant titles dominating. Sidney Ahlstrom’s 1972 doorstopper, A Religious History of the American People (Yale), was the granddaddy of them all, exploring American Christianity in a magisterial fashion from its European antecedents to its “post-Puritan” flowering. The tome offered brief nods to Judaism and African-American religion, but next to nothing about Islam or Asian religions.
Ahlstrom’s approach hasn’t entirely disappeared from the landscape of scholarly publishing on American religious history; in fact, the book is Yale’s all-time bestselling backlist title in this category, with more than 60,000 copies sold in all editions. But the relative simplicity of Ahlstrom’s narrative, which placed mainstream Christianity at the center and other forms of religion on the margins, has been turned on its head by a crop of new titles that redefine the field’s scope and methodology.
“The story of American religious history is now being told both about those who live at the margins and by those living at the margins,” says Carey Newman, director of Baylor University Press.
Popular topics in American religious history reflect that movement toward the margins, with a new emphasis on globalism, expanded attention to race, and growing interest in atheism and Islam. Meanwhile, evangelical Christian history titles are enjoying a comeback, but with a twist.
A Global Outlook
“I get feedback from manuscript reviewers that while they’re interested in American history, our world is so connected, and it has been for so long—even though we haven’t always recognized it—that global/transnational perspectives really should be considered, even if a book’s focus is more explicitly on the United States,” says Sarah Stanton, senior acquisitions editor at Rowman & Littlefield. R&L’s fall book The Jesuits: A History from Ignatius to the Present by John W. O’Malley (Oct.) takes just such a global approach, “emphasizing the international reach” of the Jesuits’ missionary work and the fact that the Argentine Pope Francis is “particularly Jesuit.”
Elaine Maisner, senior executive editor at University of North Carolina Press, cites “global movement of religions” as a topic where she is seeing lots of activity. One of UNC’s lead titles for fall, The Call of Bilal: Islam in the African Diaspora (Oct.), covers black Muslim experiences in the Americas, northern Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Europe.
Fred Appel, executive editor at Princeton University Press, agrees that “American religious history, like the field of American history more generally, has developed a much more global outlook in recent years. Younger, up-and-coming scholars are more inclined to adopt transnational perspectives and examine how key moments in American history have been informed by people, events, and networks that transcend the boundaries of this country.”
One of Princeton’s lead titles for fall exemplifies this trend. Robert Wuthnow’s Rough Country: How Texas Became America’s Most Powerful Bible-Belt State (Aug.) may appear on the surface to be a straightforward sociological study of “red” America, but “Wuthnow’s keen attention in this book to issues of migration and immigration—and in particular how attitudes toward new immigrants from the south and overseas have shaped Texan culture—typify the more global perspective of recent scholarship,” says Appel.
There are advantages to a global outlook, according to Jennifer Banks, executive editor at Yale University Press. Thematically, she says, “People seem to be looking at how religion crosses borders, both theoretically and in practice.” Yale’s winter title A Path in the Mighty Waters: Shipboard Life and Atlantic Crossings to the New World (Jan. 2015) explores the spiritual and cultural conversions that sometimes happened on board in the 18th century.
Pushing the boundaries of American religious history is not just better scholarship but better business, Banks says. “In an era of global publishing, we are trying to find books that will work well in our export markets, and we are slightly less domestically focused. That said, we do still see American history as a key part of our publishing program.”
Race and Border Crossings
Scholars are also looking to the topic of race to investigate histories that have not been told before—or to rediscover old stories through new lenses. For example, there is practically a cottage industry of historical books about WWII theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but virtually nothing until now about the critical period he spent studying at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he attended the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem week after week. Reggie L. Williams’s Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and the Ethic of Resistance (Baylor, Sept.) traces how Bonhoeffer was influenced by Adam Clayton Powell Sr. to consider race and justice, and how Bonhoeffer applied that knowledge to his Christian life after he returned to Germany.
At Penn State, a two-volume history aims to chronicle the relationship between gospel music and freedom in American history. Robert Darden’s Nothing but Love in God’s Water: Black Sacred Music from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement straddles several academic fields (religion, African-American studies, music); the first volume releases in October. Acquisitions editor Kathryn B. Yahner says one of her greatest challenges in the field of American religious history today is to meet “the growing demands of readers looking for a more nontraditional telling of the story of religion in the life of America.”
Nontraditional could describe Roberto Ramón Lint Sagarena’s interdisciplinary study Aztlán and Arcadia: Religion, Ethnicity, and the Creation of Place, an innovative book from NYU Press (Sept.). After the Mexican-American War, many different ethnic groups had to renegotiate their sense of identity “to make sense of their place in North America,” says NYU senior editor Jennifer Hammer. “The volume not only makes a contribution to the growing field of Chicano/a religious studies but also to the study of religion and race in America more broadly.”
Immigration studies is a trend within the overall study of race, say some editors. Why, where, and when do people cross borders? Once here, how do they respond to existing residents and to other immigrants? At the University of Georgia Press, Deborah Dash Moore’s Urban Origins of American Judaism (Oct.) “is as much about urban and immigrant experiences as it is about Judaism in America,” says editor-in-chief Mick Gusinde-Duffy.
Overall, attention to race has paid off for many presses. At Princeton, the bestselling backlist title in American religious history continues to be God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights by Charles Marsh. First published in 1997 and repackaged in 2008 with a new preface by the author, the book has sold 16,700 copies in all editions. “The civil rights movement is of course much studied at the college level, and the strong religious underpinning to the movement makes it a popular object of study in departments of religious studies and in seminaries and divinity schools,” says Princeton’s Appel. And more recently, UNC’s The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America by Edward Blum and Paul Harvey has sold around 8,000 copies since it was released in fall 2012.
Atheism on the Rise
Although the trend is still small, books on atheism and secularism are gaining ground in scholarship on American religious history. NYU now has a Secular Studies series edited by Phil Zuckerman, whose 2008 book Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment was a “surprise strong seller” for the press, Hammer says. The series’ first installment will be out next year, examining how religiously unaffiliated parents choose to address religion in raising their children.
Stanford University Press has Faith as an Option: Possible Futures for Christianity (Sept.), Hans Joas’s argument for religious and secular perspectives to mutually enrich one another. But not all university presses are jumping on the secularism bandwagon. “There is a slight uptick in this area,” says Georgia’s Gusinde-Duffy, but in the U.S., many booksellers, librarians, and citizens “remain deeply suspicious and uncomfortable around the topic of atheism.”
Evangelicals Are Back, with a Twist
Books on evangelical history have never gone away, but they did lose steam after the upsurge in evangelical scholarship in the ’80s and ’90s. Some publishers continue to reap the benefits of that renaissance period. Oxford, for example, says its strongest backlist title in American religious history is George Marsden’s Fundamentalism in American Culture, first published in 1980, which has sold tens of thousands of copies in two editions. Also at Oxford, Randall Balmer’s popular Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America has just been repackaged in a special 25th-anniversary edition (Sept.)
But today’s books on evangelicalism are as likely to focus on the ways that evangelicals themselves, once on the margins of the American religious establishment, have become consummate insiders. Joyce Seltzer, senior executive editor for history and contemporary affairs at Harvard University Press, says America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation by Grant Wacker (Nov.) will trace the evangelist’s enduring influence on American theology and media. Another Harvard release, also slated for November, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism by Matthew Avery Sutton, shows evangelical prophecy beliefs becoming mainstream.
If books on evangelicalism are chronicling the overall movement from the margins to the center, this especially includes segments of evangelicalism that have historically been even further out on the periphery. UNC’s Maisner observes that Pentecostal studies is an up-and-coming field, and Baylor’s Newman predicts Pentecostal theology will be particularly important. “Amos Yong’s Renewing Christian Theology (Baylor, Aug.) vividly reflects the explosion and creative influence of Pentecostalism in America,” he notes. “The fortunes of the Christian church in America are tied to the future of what was once at the edges—the renewal movements of charismatic and Pentecostal traditions. Margins now matter.”
