introduction For three decades, the study of religious history has been surging in America, a trend reflected in the remarkable results of the American Historical Association’s 2009 survey, which showed that religion had become the most common specialty among professional historians. religious history possessed its greatest number of adherents among younger historians, signaling that this was a development not likely to vanish any time soon.1 experts offered various reasons for the survey results, but Yale historian Jon Butler spoke for many when he suggested that the growing popularity of religious history resulted from “the ob- vious inadequacy of the secularization thesis to explain world history since 1945.”2 c rude versions of secularization theory posited the inexorable privatization and decline of faith in the withering light of modernity, yet increasingly since World War ii religion has seemed to be every- where: publicly and politically significant, on the rise, not the decline. Around the world vibrant expressions of all major religions have rede- fined terms of local and international engagement and made the “god factor” a global phenomenon. christianity’s vigor may have faded in western europe, but elsewhere—in sub-saharan Africa, central and south America, and parts of Asia—it has grown at mind-boggling rates. in the United states, meanwhile, many evangelical christians have be- come closely connected with political conservatism and recently a “Tea 1 © UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME 2 American Evangelicalism Party” movement that has countered President Barack Obama at every turn. American evangelicals have not been alone in their growing desire to make religion count in politics and society. During this same recent stretch of time liberal Protestants, catholics, and Jews have defended Obama’s progressive politics, while people of other non-Judeo-­Christian traditions have carried out similarly ambitious quests to orient commu- nity and country to their spiritual values. spurred on by new immigra- tion, new media, and a new global economic order, religious citizens have bucked predictions of secularization and stepped out into the public square. As a result, pundits and scholars alike can no longer deny the historical significance or currency of faith in the modern world. One might expect the history of religion to be torn by the same ideological rifts that have emerged amid this rising tide of religiosity, and to some extent that has happened. evangelical christians, for in- stance, have often turned to nonacademic, entrepreneurial history writ- ers who offer a christian-inflected version of the American past. con- versely, several academic and journalistic historians have argued for fully secular versions of the American past, and especially of the American founding, in which the faith factor is written out of the narrative or downplayed as only a minor motivation for a few marginal historical actors. But welcome developments in recent decades have offered a way beyond a staunchly ideological history of religion. First, a number of professional historians with no firm faith com- mitments themselves have written deeply sympathetic yet critical histo- ries of American religion. The pioneer of this kind of scholarship was Harvard’s Perry miller, who in the mid-twentieth century reinvigorated the serious intellectual study of Puritanism. With noticeable accelera- tion since the 1990s, historians of miller’s ilk—those who do not neces- sarily hold to any faith commitment—have joined the rush to incorpo- rate sacred matters in their treatments of American economic, social, cultural, and especially political development. David Hollinger has claimed that “religion is too important to be left in the hands of people who believe in it,” and whether or not they have heard this call, histori- ans of late have seemed ready to prove his point. spurred on by trends in Washington, where movement politics on the right and left have leaned on religion to marshal voters, political historians especially have © UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME introduction 3 been eager to integrate religion in their histories of grassroots mobiliza- tion, congressional and presidential policy, and inner-Beltway power struggles. second, and more to the point of this volume, a number of believ- ing historians have broken out of the constraints of denominational, hagiographical history and engaged with the methods of mainstream academic history, producing sympathetic histories that locate churches and parishioners within their cultural and political milieu. mark noll notes in his conclusion to this volume that Timothy smith, a nazarene who received his PhD at Harvard before joining the faculty at Johns Hopkins, was the parallel to Perry miller among believing historians with mainstream academic credentials. smith’s Revivalism and Social Reform (1957) remains a standard work for all historians interested in understanding the great nineteenth-century campaigns for social im- provement. Thanks to smith’s legacy and the influence of other like- minded chroniclers (such as noll) who profess faith commitments but write for a wider public, the quest to blend personal belief with rigor- ous, first-rate scholarship continues to inspire many young, ambitious historians.3 george marsden’s illustrious career bears witness to the rise of reli- gion in America’s new historical consciousness and the attempt by some scholars to write history from a faith-friendly perspective. marsden, one could say, was destined for this type of impact. After growing up in a Pennsylvania town and a devout Orthodox Presbyterian family, he at- tended the Quaker-affiliated Haverford college, attained an mDiv at Westminster seminary, a leading institution in his denominational tra- dition, and took his PhD in American studies at Yale University. At Yale, marsden worked with edmund morgan, a student of Perry miller and arguably the greatest historian of colonial and revolutionary America since World War ii. As marsden offered in a 2009 reflective piece for Reviews in American History, morgan was his “stylistic idol,” the teacher who taught him how to write not just for specialists in his field but also for laypeople—those who (as morgan put it) “are smarter than you but know nothing about the subject.” considering his work’s mass appeal, marsden obviously internalized morgan’s message. even more signifi- cant for his training in American religious history, however, was the © UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME 4 American Evangelicalism guidance of sydney Ahlstrom, his doctoral adviser. Ahlstrom’s magiste- rial A Religious History of the American People is still one of the standard surveys of religion in America; its volumes appear on many a religious history syllabus and many a graduate student’s exam reading list. Ahl- strom trained marsden and a number of other leading historians to take religion seriously but also to see religion as shaping, and shaped by, broader culture. marsden’s arduous theological preparation within his denominational perspective, and the wider professional training he re- ceived at Yale from morgan and Ahlstrom, proved to be a potent com- bination.4 evidence of this striking balance soon surfaced in marsden’s writ- ings. His first book,The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience (1970), was probably his narrowest, as one might expect from a revised doctoral dissertation. it was the closest thing marsden ever wrote to denominational history, yet, as Peter Wallace notes in his essay for this volume, it also heralded the great theme of all of marsden’s sub- sequent work: the evangelical mind. marsden’s authorship of Fundamen- talism and American Culture (1980) facilitated his first major impact on the discussion of American religion. As Barry Hankins comments, Fun- damentalism and American Culture almost single-handedly created a new historiography—the intellectual history of American fundamentalism— leaving others to flesh out that history in the three decades since. The book also had impeccable timing, coming out just as the moral majority burst onto the American political scene. Finally, it had such a compel- ling literary quality that many christian historians recall reading it for the first time as a curious experience, almost like reading one’s own life story. While Fundamentalism made the persuasive case that fundamen- talists had a real intellectual pedigree, Reforming Evangelicalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (1987) revealed the darker side of that pedigree as it generated the wars over biblical inerrancy at Fuller seminary. Determined to craft an effective sequel to Fundamentalism and American Culture, yet equally set on testing different methods and approaches to the writing of evangelicalism’s history, marsden master- fully exploited the internal history of Fuller seminary—fascinating as it was on its own terms—for fresh reading of the tumultuous theological, cultural, and political forces that reshaped fundamentalism in the post– © UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME introduction 5 World War ii years. Though different from Fundamentalism in American Culture in its focus and reach, Reforming Fundamentalism displayed the same creativity and combination of incisive analysis with compelling prose as its predecessor. The scale of marsden’s innovation and impact continued to broaden after the publication of Reforming Fundamentalism, in part because his own interest in evangelicalism’s history assumed broader proportions. marsden has always worked at a