Regeneration and Morality: A Study of Charles Finney, Charles Hodge, John W. Nevin, and Horace Bushnell. By Glenn A. Hewitt. Chicago Studies in the History of American Religion 7. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson Publishing, 1991. xvii + 234 pp. $50.00.

1992 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 419-420
Author(s):  
E. Brooks Holifield
Keyword(s):  
American Religion ◽  
Horace Bushnell ◽  
History Of ◽  
Charles Finney

Man up : muscular Christianity and the making of 20th-century American religion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Hunter M. Hampton
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
American Religion ◽  
University Of Missouri ◽  
Basketball Game ◽  
History Of ◽  
Muscular Christianity ◽  
Student Newspapers ◽  
Religious Colleges

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] "Man Up: Muscular Christianity and the Making of 20th-Century American Religion," examines the history of muscular Christianity in 20th-century America. Specifically, I analyze how liberal Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, fundamentalists, and evangelicals used muscular Christianity to navigate the cultural waters from religious outsiders into the mainstream. My project began by asking why millions of Americans hear sermons filled with sports analogies, attend Bible studies that follow a basketball game, and read books written by NFL quarterbacks? I discovered that over the course of the 20th century religious institutions, particularly religious colleges, used muscular Christianity to attract, convert, and retain men. By using student newspapers from Notre Dame, BYU and Wheaton College as a primary source base, my research provides a grassroots perspective on how the laity lived this religious message preached by religious authorities. I conclude that these communities used muscular Christianity to solidify their distinct religious identities and dissolve barriers with outsiders. Though its iterations shift over time and within each religious community, the blend of masculinity, sports, heroic-savagery, and homosocial community remained the remedy for the next generation to man up. My project expands the interpretation of 20th-century American history in three ways. First, I illustrate that muscular Christianity is one of the primary shapers of 20th-century American religion. Second my research explicates the larger cultural trends of therapeutic and consumer culture on American religion. Finally, my project helps fill the void in the history of religion and sports.

American Religion and the Rise of Internal Security

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Gin Lum ◽  
Lerone A. Martin
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Context ◽  
American Religion ◽  
Federal Bureau ◽  
Internal Security ◽  
Federal Bureau Of Investigation ◽  
Cultural Milieu ◽  
History Of

In this chapter, Kathryn Gin Lum and Lerone Martin sketch the decades leading up to the formation of the Bureau of Investigation in 1908—later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This chapter offers readers a summary of the cultural and institutional context that led to the Bureau’s creation and the nature of American religion during that period. The chapter sets the stage for readers to understand the initial historical and cultural milieu in which the long history of the FBI’s relationship with religion took root.

Introduction: Memorialization, Gay Assimilation, and American Religion

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Brett Krutzsch
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
American Religion ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Lgbt Rights ◽  
American Citizenship ◽  
Aids Crisis ◽  
Gay Activism ◽  
History Of

The introduction addresses how gay activists memorialized select people as martyrs in order to influence national debates over LGBT rights. In particular, the chapter lays out how religion shaped both the process of gay political memorialization as well as gay assimilation in the United States more broadly. The introduction additionally covers the history of American gay activism, the rise of assimilatory tactics following the American AIDS crisis, and the promotion of gays as “normal” citizens. As became common at the turn of the twenty-first century, many gay activists argued that gays were just like straights and, therefore, deserving of equal rights. The chapter also details how Protestant sexual standards shaped the nation’s ideas about acceptable sexual citizens and, in turn, how gay activists promoted Protestant values as necessary for the rights of full American citizenship.

Reflections on American Religion

Worldview ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 40-45
Author(s):  
James A. Nuechterlein
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Church History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
General Tendency ◽  
American Religion ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Liberty Of Conscience ◽  
Religious Nation

America is a religious nation, but its historians, like most of its intellectuals, tend to be secular. As a result, American religious history has remained until relatively recently an intellectually underdeveloped field. The prevailing liberal and secular biases of most historians produced overviews of church history notable for anachronistic judgments and a general tendency to miss the point of religious experience. The history of American religion was regularly written from a perspective in which the chief ends of faith were liberty of conscience and the transformation of the social order. (These comments apply particularly to what might be termed the textbook consensus on American religion; they are less true of monographic studies or of the myriad—and often filiopietistic—denominational histories. As Herbert Butterfield noted almost fifty years ago in The Whig Interpretation of History, whig biases normally crop up in broad historical overviews rather than in detailed researches.)

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