Thomas Jefferson and James Madison are frequently identified as the framers of the religion clauses in the First Amendment, thus making their efforts to establish religious freedom in colonial Virginia relevant to the Constitution's meaning. This interpretive approach first appeared in a Supreme Court opinion in 1878 when Chief Justice Morrison Waite applied the religion clauses to the case of a Mormon official prosecuted under a federal antipolygamy law. For historical background, Justice Waite studied books by church historians Robert Reid Howison and Robert Baylor Semple. There, he encountered narratives of the political activism of the Baptists and Presbyterians who, in conjunction with the efforts of Madison and Jefferson, were responsible for Virginia's statutory commitment to religious freedom. The Chief Justice then grafted Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments and Jefferson's now-famous “wall of separation” letter onto the Constitution's bare text, an emendation that has endured for well over a century. Church historians Semple and Howison, and the pivotal role they played in the foundation of First Amendment jurisprudence, have been essentially lost from the historiographical record of church-state relations in America, a situation this article seeks to remedy.

During the 1930s and 1940s, the Great Depression and the rise of communism and fascism in Europe convinced a broad spectrum of Americans that they were living through a prolonged “crisis of civilization” with real potential to destroy all they held dear. Meanwhile, they saw evidence that these global problems put young people especially at risk for immorality, loss of hope, and political subversion. Because the “youth problem” and the “world crisis” seemed to be inextricably linked, even the everyday behaviors of young people took on a heightened political significance in the eyes of many adults. Christian leaders from across the spectrum of churches—Mainline Protestant, Evangelical, Roman Catholic, and African American—did not just capitalize on this obsession with youth and the fate of civilization; they did all they could to fan those flames. They did so not cynically, but sincerely, believing that they could and should save the world by saving American youth. Yet these leaders were also making a bid for influence in American society and for control of the future of their churches. The resulting politicized views of youth and youth work would not only influence the outcomes of internal church battles, but they would also shape how various Christian groups responded to the Cold War.

The Christian Century is generally regarded as the most influential Protestant magazine of the early twentieth century. But what does it mean to call the Century influential? Whom did it influence, and how? This article takes a historical approach, examining the size of the Century's audience, the nature of the magazine's impact on its readers, and the ability of those readers to extend the magazine's impact beyond themselves. The main source for this investigation is a cache of more than 2,100 unpublished letters collected in 1928 to celebrate Charles Clayton Morrison's twentieth anniversary as editor. In subscribers' own words, the letters illustrated the Century's role as a crucial link among readers with similar backgrounds and aspirations, as well as the limits of its reach beyond this cohort. The article argues that the Century was influential, but not because it converted (directly or through its clergy readers) large numbers of American Protestants to its progressive vision for Christianity. Rather, the Century was primarily influential in the process of mainline identification, both in the sense of defining which writers, institutions, and ideas belonged to the emerging mainline tradition and in the sense of offering readers an opportunity to identify with that tradition. A better understanding of the Century's influence during the Morrison era sheds light on the rise of the mainline. Additionally, a better understanding of the kinds of influence magazines do and do not exercise is helpful for anyone who looks to periodicals to provide a barometer of cultural trends.

In the 1920s, a child evangelist by the name of Uldine Utley toured the United States, attracting large crowds and captivating the press. She enjoyed the support of ministers from a wide variety of denominations, though her most ardent proponent was the famous fundamentalist preacher John Roach Straton. In many ways, Utley's success seems to counter existing narratives of early-twentieth-century religious history. Her revivalist ministry developed in an era that saw the decline of revivalism, and she rose to prominence during the height of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. Claiming to adhere to biblical “literalism,” she nonetheless affirmed the appropriateness of female preaching. And, in the wake of efforts to masculinize American Protestantism and rediscover a “muscular” Christianity, Utley was known and celebrated for her femininity and beauty.

Utley's femininity was, in fact, central to her appeal. She preached a “sweet and kindly gospel” and fashioned an elaborate feminine persona. Her diminutive size, her blond hair and blue eyes, and her white attire seemed to give her an “angelic” appearance, and her persistent association with flowers, both allegorical and real, further contributed to her aura of femininity. In the context of shifting gender arrangements and changing constructions of sexuality and morality in early-twentieth-century America, Utley's femininity and innocence provided a soothing alternative to the uncertain times. But the model of femininity Utley displayed was fraught with ambivalence and proved difficult to maintain as she matured from child to young woman. In addition to illuminating a frequently overlooked strand of conservative Protestantism during this time, attention to Utley's life and ministry also reveals a powerful yet ambivalent script that remains available to modern Protestant women to this day.

This essay considers American Catholics who, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, reflected seriously on the religious significance of technology in general, and space science in particular. American Catholics, while no more immune from the belief that space science would create fundamental changes in human life than their Protestant, Jewish, and secular counterparts, nevertheless sought to understand the Space Age in their own distinctive terms. Catholic discussion of these issues revolved around the contributions of two theologians. From the earliest moments of the Space Age, Thomas Aquinas provided a justification for the work of Catholic scientists and astronauts within a Cold War framework. However, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's cosmic vision helped American Catholics integrate feelings of wonder and hope with darkly realistic fears about the military consequences of the space race. Thomas and Teilhard, fundamentally optimists, helped Catholics elaborate a vision of a way forward through the very real threats Americans confronted in the “long 1960s,” a vision they developed in books, articles, and speeches, but also in art, liturgy, and fiction. Ultimately, however, both extreme hopes about cosmic unification and extreme fears about total annihilation modulated, and like their fellow Americans interested in space flight during the 1960s, American Catholics turned in the early 1970s to a renewed focus on the Earth.

Throughout history, human communities have converted the dead into sources of living power by grafting symbolic structures onto them and their places of interment. The impact of these structures on society, however, indicates that the “dead” are understood as more than physical remains. The dead can be imagined also as memories, spirits, or deities, and the physical or spiritual locations where they reside are essential to the vitality of the symbolism. When the dead are symbolized and carefully integrated into cultural and/or religious systems, they can become a potent source of political power for those who control the meaning of the dead and their physical remains. For this reason, the dead—especially their tombs and remains—have historically been a valuable commodity in the religious and cultural marketplace.

This essay examines a six-year campaign against the radical faith healer John Alexander Dowie mounted in the 1890s by Chicago doctors, public health officials, and their “respectable” middle-class allies. The incident demonstrates the important role of religion in the process of medical professionalization. Medical professionals established cultural authority by aligning themselves with a broader discourse of “orthodoxy”—an ill-defined set of beliefs and practices thought necessary to maintain social order. Protestants used this discourse both to exclude outsiders and unite elites across denominational lines. An initial attempt to prosecute Dowie based on legalistic claims of practicing medicine without a license led to a backlash against medical professionals by middle-class Protestants who believed it compromised the integrity of religious liberty. This suggests that the growing efficacy of medical advances was an insufficient basis of social authority. Only when medical professionals self-consciously aligned themselves with the Protestant establishment and portrayed themselves as defenders of the social order (focused especially on the integrity of the family) were they able to rally the middle classes to their cause. This shift in rhetoric was an important step in the process of creating a discourse of “orthodox” medicine. It helped grant medical professionals the right to oversee the public body just as elite Protestants superintended its soul.

From its founding in 1987, the Alliance of Baptists’ stance on women in ministry served as the nexus point from which the small denominational body departed from its denominational forebears in the Southern Baptist Convention. As the Alliance adopted more and more progressive theological and social ideas, Southern Baptists adopted more and more conservative counterpoints, at times in response to each other. In 2021, the divergence of these two bodies came to the fore. As members of the Alliance of Baptists adopted a new covenant statement committing the denomination to “act to dismantle systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, and abusive power,” the Southern Baptists had walked away from working through their pro-slavery past and were agitating against critical race theory. Theological moves that began in a debate over women's ordination morphed into larger shifts that redefined what it meant to be a Baptist in the modern United States. How both denominational bodies came to embrace different systems of authority and governance in the late 1980s set both groups on divergent paths, leading to strikingly antithetical positions not only on issues of gender but also on issues surrounding race. The contrast further affirms that questions of gender and religious authority and questions of racism and white supremacy within denominational contexts are not isolated, separate questions but rather are deeply intertwined and related to one another. Overall, this SBC–Alliance history demonstrates how denominational bodies actively consider proximate organizations as they develop their own policies, processes, and public proclamations.

This article examines how radical evangelicals employed psychological concepts such as sanity, temperament, and especially the subconscious as they struggled to understand and respond to the rapidly expanding pentecostal movement within their midst. By tracing the growing tensions over ecstatic spiritual experiences that emerged among Holiness and Higher Life believers during the 1880s and 1890s, this article demonstrates that differing assumptions about the importance of consciousness for the religious life presaged reactions to the pentecostal revivals of the early twentieth century. Although their proclivity for rational judgment predisposed Higher Life evangelicals to question the sanity of involuntary phenomena such as speaking in tongues, some prominent leaders within this community appealed to “mental science” in an effort to revise conventional understandings of the spiritual self and its capacities. For participants in the Christian and Missionary Alliance— an organization in which disputes over the propriety of pentecostalism were particularly contentious—notions of temperament and the subconscious articulated in the works of “new psychologists” like William James offered resources for reassessing Higher Life views of authentic spirituality in light of pentecostal revivalism. By analyzing how a particular faction within the radical evangelical movement made use of psychological theories to contend with the challenge of the revivals at Azusa and elsewhere, this article exposes some of the social divisions that exacerbated debates over the validity of pentecostal religious experiences. Exploring the complicated interactions and creative tensions that arose as Higher Life evangelicals appropriated constructs such as the subconscious in the wake of Azusa Street also shows that this influential contingent of conservative Protestants engaged with aspects of the field of psychology in dynamic and inventive ways that involved both selective borrowing and critical resistance. While there is truth in the common observation that radical evangelicals were deeply suspicious of the “new science of Psychology,” this article uncovers a more complex history that expands our understanding of the interplay among scientific discourse, the varieties of evangelical spiritual experience, and the emergence of pentecostalism in the early twentieth century.

In 1938, Jerome Folkman, a Reform rabbi from Grand Rapids, Michigan, attended a dinner party hosted by one of his congregants. The guests had finished eating and were settling into typical after-dinner chatter, when the audacious “Mr. R.” broke the rhythm and declared, “We should send missionaries to the gentiles and try to win converts to Judaism.” Side conversations halted and the guests, all Jewish, curiously peered at Mr. R. as he continued: “Why aren't we more aggressive? Why don't we ask others to join our ranks?” The guests tittered. Some giggled nervously, others muttered that Jews just don't do that. A pragmatist interrupted—the suggestion, in his mind, was only as good as its actual consequences. “Do you think we would get any converts?” he asked. Rabbi Folkman, who later divulged he, too, had toyed with the idea of Jews becoming missionaries in America, tried to clarify the kernel of wisdom behind Mr. R.'s shocking statement.

The New England tradition of violence is a curiously dual one. For more than a Century after their arrival in Boston, the Puritans of New England participated in the wave of genocidal violence that helped decimate Native communities throughout the Americas. To a lesser degree, they also turned their violent energies against members of their own Community by banishing, torturing, and killing those Puritans who embraced the Quaker doctrine of the inner light or who were accused by their neighbors of witchcraft. Yet, rarely has a community been so self-conscious about its own violence, so determined to find ultimate meaning in the midst of atrocity. What could it mean, New Englanders persistently asked, that their “city on a hill” was enmeshed in violence? For at least two of the theological traditions that took strongest hold in New England—Puritanism and liberalism—this question was an inescapable preoccupation.

Between 1875 and 1896, the response of American Catholic thinkers to theories of organic evolution was characterized by little rancor and discord. Among the small number of clergy and lay intellectuals who addressed the subject, there existed a wide variety of positions on the scientific plausibility of such theories. These prominent Catholics were not deeply wedded to their views, however, and few saw any significant conflict between their religious commitments and biological evolution. This state of affairs stemmed from several elements of Catholic thought, particularly as it existed in the late-nineteenth-century United States: the conviction that church authority could mediate any apparent tension between science and Scripture; the affirmation that theories of organic evolution would not undermine existing theological tenets about the relationship between religion and science, as well as that between First Cause and secondary causes in nature; the belief that Catholic intellectuals since the time of Augustine had endorsed a system of natural development that closely resembled modern conceptions of evolution; and, most important, the insistence that the theory could be reconciled with the resurgent neo-Scholasticism that had come to dominate Catholic thought. Organic evolution proved far less significant in discussions of the relationship between religion and science among American Catholics than it did among Protestants, and it did little to contribute to the split of Catholics into liberal and conservative groups.

On Martha's Vineyard in the late seventeenth Century, a Native American called George suffered from being “Tormented” and “impotent” and sought out a renowned “Powaw,” or shaman, for help. According to Matthew Mayhew, who published the story in 1697, the shaman diagnosed George's troubles as effects of witchcraft and proceeded to “dance around a great fire” with George and other sick Natives “lying by.” Other Natives broke up the dance, claiming that the Powaw himself had “bewitched” the sick, and “threatened to burn him unless he cured the sick man.” Fortunately for the shaman, when he “felt the heat of the fire, the sick immediately recovered.”