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Two Centuries of Christianity in America: An Overview

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Paul Boyer
Paul Boyer
Affiliation:
Paul Boyer is Merle Curti Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Abstract

While the year 2000 did not prove to be the eschatological blockbuster that some of our bolder Bible prophecy popularizers anticipated, nor the year when all our computers melted down, as some Y2K alarmists predicted, it did provoke some historians to step back from their usual topics of inquiry to attempt to sum up in a broad overview fashion some of the major developments in the century just past. A spate of books like Harvard Sitkoff's edited collection of essays, Perspectives on Modern America, with its subtitle, “Making Sense of the Twentieth Century,” were the result. In that spirit, as 2000 approached, I undertook an even more presumptuous venture: a brief overview of not one but two centuries of Christianity in America, from 1800 to the present, as a kind of outline sketch for a hypothetical book on the subject. The result is this essay. Once I had embarked on such a potentially foolhardy project, the practical question remained: What meaningful generalizations about two centuries of American Christianity could one offer in a relatively short space such as that provided by Church History's “Perspectives” feature? Still, Cotton Mather once boasted that he had boiled down the entire plan of salvation onto a single piece of paper, so from that perspective, five thousand or so words seemed ample indeed.

Type
Perspectives
Information
Church History , Volume 70 , Issue 3 , September 2001 , pp. 544 - 556
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2001

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References

1. An earlier version of this paper was given on 10 January 1999 at the Washington, D.C. meeting of the American Society of Church History. My thanks to then-ASCH president Ronald Numbers of the Department of the History of Medicine and the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the invitation to participate in that conference and to Professor R. Marie Griffith of the Princeton University Department of Religion for her thoughtful comments on that earlier paper.Google Scholar

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