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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2018
Over the last decade, a noteworthy number of published studies have, in one fashion or another, been defined with reference to religious denominations. This is an arresting fact, for, coincidentally, the status of religious denominations in the society has been called into question. Some formerly powerful bodies have lost membership (at least relatively speaking) and now experience reduced influence, while newer forms of religious organization(s)—e.g., parachurch groups and loosely structured movements—have flourished. The most compelling recent analysis of religion in modern American society gives relatively little attention to them. Why, then, have publications in large numbers appeared, in scale almost seeming to be correlated inversely to this trend?
No single answer to this question is adequate. Surely one general factor is that historians often “work out of phase” with contemporary social change. If denominations have been displaced as a form of religious institution in society in the late twentieth century, then their prominence in earlier eras is all the more intriguing.
1. In particular, see Wuthnow, Robert, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).Google Scholar
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3. The volume dedicated to the Presbyterians, by Randall Balmer and John Fitzmier, has been issued in a paperback version that excludes the extensive biographical entries that are a common feature of the books in the series. See discussion of the book, infra, and note 9.
4. Bowden, Henry Warner, Dictionary of American Religious Biography, 1st ed. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977).Google Scholar
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15. Coalter, Milton J., Mulder, John M., and Weeks, Louis B., eds., The Presbyterian Predicament: Six Perspectives (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990).Google Scholar
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17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 8-9.
19. See especially Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion.
20. Coalter, Milton J., Mulder, John M., and Weeks, Louis B., eds., The Confessional Mosaic: Presbyterians and Twentieth-Century Theology (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990).Google Scholar
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27. Among the many that might be cited are those such as Moore, R. Laurence, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; and Finke, Roger and Stark, Rodney, The Churching of America, 1790-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992).Google Scholar
28. May, Henry, “The Recovery of American Religious History,” American Historical Review 80 (1964): 79–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar