Content area
Full text
America's Religions: From Their Origins to the Twenty-First Century. By Peter S. Williams. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. xiv + 600 pp. $59.95 cloth; 29.95 paper.
What should a state-of-the-art textbook in American religious history look like? Particularly since the 1990s, when works like Tom Tweed's Retelling U.S. Religious History (Berkeley; University of California Press, 1997) effectively challenged the grand narrative definitively delineated in Sydney Ahlstrom s Religious History of the American People (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972), debate has flourished not only over how best to tell the story of American religions, but also over whether there is a unified story to tell.
A group of scholars who have written some of the best texts in the field debated strategies on constructing the introductory textbook at an ACHS panel in January, 2006. John Corrigan, who has revised several editions of Winthrop Hudson's classic Religion in America (7th ed., Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2003), spoke of the need to "flatten" Winthrop's "story of Protestant triumphant" and leaven Winthrop's focus on the history of doctrine with social history and a consideration of popular religion. Mark Noll, author of A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1992), agreed with Corrigan that Winthrop's interest in doctrine reflected the seminary training no longer regnant in the field. Noll noted that his text reflected that training as well, and that his expertise in the history of Christian thought allowed him to make evaluative judgments (for example, regarding slavery or the...