American Church History

At the heart of the nation's spiritual history are audacious and often violent scenes. But the Puritans and the shining city on the hill give us just one way to understand the United States. Rather than recite American history from a Christian vantage point, Peter Manseau proves that what really happened is worth a close, fresh look.

The First Amendment to the US Constitution codified the principle that the government should play no role in favoring or supporting any religion, while allowing free exercise of all religions (including unbelief). More than two centuries later, the results from this experiment are overwhelming: The separation of church and state has shielded the government from religious factionalism, and the United States boasts a diverse religious culture unmatched anywhere in the world.

Missionary Diplomacy illuminates the crucial place of religion in nineteenth-century American diplomacy. From the 1810s through the 1920s, Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key experts in the development of American relations in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Missionaries served as consuls, translators, and occasional trouble-makers who forced the State Department to take actions it otherwise would have avoided. Yet as decades passed, more Americans began to question the propriety of missionaries' power.

On September 15, 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL, was bombed, killing four young girls. Who were the perpetrators? Due to reluctant witnesses and racial prejudice, the FBI closed the case without any indictments. But as Martin Luther King, Jr., claimed, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Bending Toward Justice is a detailed account of this key moment in our national struggle for equality and the long road to prosecuting those responsible for the tragedy, related by an author who played a major role in the investigation.

On July 2, 1822, Denmark Vesey, a formerly enslaved man, was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina. He was convicted of plotting what might have been the largest insurrection against slaveholders in US history. Witnesses claimed that Vesey appealed to numerous biblical texts to promote and justify the revolt.

What do you get when you mix divine visions, secret wives, homemade money, and a printing press smashed by order of God’s self-declared mouthpiece? A body on the jailhouse floor and a story too wild for Sunday School. In this blisteringly funny, historically ruthless follow-up to Before the Revelation, Argor Barpha drags you through the final years of Joseph Smith—the American mystic who wasn’t content just starting a church. He wanted a kingdom. Maybe even a crown. From the ruins of Kirtland to the blood-soaked cornfields of Missouri, from the swamp city of Nauvoo to the Carthage ...

Noll demonstrates how supporters and opponents of slavery and segregation drew equally on the Bible to justify the morality of their positions. He shows how a common evangelical heritage supported Jim Crow discrimination and contributed powerfully to the black theology of liberation preached by Martin Luther King Jr.

Where Baptists Stood: Early Baptists, Slavery, and the Price of Freedom What did early Baptists believe about slavery? Before the American Revolution, Baptists were a persecuted minority. They were jailed, fined, and whipped for refusing to submit to state churches. They were poor, scattered, and far removed from political power. Yet in a world increasingly shaped by slavery, they maintained a clear focus: preaching the gospel and defending liberty of conscience. In this groundbreaking historical study, veteran pastor and author Marvin McKenzie takes you on a journey through over two ...

All Americans, liberal or conservative, religious or not, can agree that religious freedom, anchored in conscience rights, is foundational to the US democratic experiment. But what freedom of conscience means, what its scope and limits are, according to the Constitution - these are matters for heated debate.

Politics Reformed makes a provocative contribution to understanding foundational questions in an era of rising fundamentalism and emboldened secularism, inspiring listeners to rethink the importance of religion in political theory and practice, and the role of the covenant tradition in particular.

The soul of America is far more than a concept—it is a people. Even the most sacred principles mean very little unless lived out passionately by an informed citizenry. In The Portable Patriot, you’ll find a carefully assembled sampling of American history’s most formative words, written by the people who made that extraordinary history. Speeches and sermons, essays and extracts, poems and proclamations illumine such values as independence, virtue, humility, bravery, thrift, prayer, liberty, and reliance on God.

In these pages Silent Cal Coolidge focuses his famed terse eloquence on the nation's founders, not merely on George Washington's indispensable figure but also on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton, Washington's fellow Virginia patriots, the Battles of Bunker Hill, Princeton, and Trenton, Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys, Boston's Old North Church, Methodist Episcopal Bishop Francis Asbury, and the pivotal role Jewish Americans played in winning of our freedoms. No modern president has spoken so much-or so well-of America's providential genesis. ...

Before September 11, 2001, one terrorist group had killed more Americans than any other: Hezbollah, the “Party of God.” Today it remains potentially more dangerous than even al Qaeda. Yet little has been known about its inner workings, past successes, and future plans–until now.

The Theme is Freedom presents a new reading of the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the constitutional founding, and the religious clauses of the First Amendment. Evans draws the conclusion that our liberties have always been dependent of the religious traditions of the West - directly contrary to accepted theory.

Every day of the week in contemporary America (and especially on Sundays) people raise money for their religious enterprises - for clergy, educators, buildings, charity, youth-oriented work, and more. In a fascinating look into the economics of American Protestantism, James Hudnut-Beumler examines how churches have raised and spent money from colonial times to the present and considers what these practices say about both religion and American culture.

Long before he was considered a top prospective presidential candidate for 2012, Governor Tim Pawlenty had already earned legendary status in conservative circles. In his hard-left-leaning home state of Minnesota, the man known as "T-Paw" somehow erased a $4.8-billion budget deficit while simultaneously reforming health care, creating jobs, improving education, and supporting renewable energy reform—all without raising taxes. In Courage to Stand, Pawlenty reveals for the first time how he found the resolve to get the job done.

The Dunker Church is one of the most iconic structures of the American Civil War. Surprisingly, few people know much if anything about its fascinating story or the role it played within the community of Sharpsburg and its importance during and after the Battle of Antietam. September Mourn: The Dunker Church of Antietam by Alann D. Schmidt and Terry W. Barkley rectifies this oversight in the first book-length study of its kind. On September 17, 1862, two mighty armies grappled across the rolling hills, fields, and woodlots surrounding Sharpsburg, Maryland.

From colonial times into the 20th century, our laws and court cases ignored atheism, assuming that all good Americans were religious. Only in the 20th century, with the passage of laws allowing for conscientious objection to war, did nonbelief enter debates about religious liberty. Still, today every one of the 20 states has God written into its constitution. God is everywhere in American public life. R. Laurence Moore and Isaac Kramnick explore both God's omnipresence and the dramatic rise in nonbelievers that has led to an "atheist awakening" intent on holding the country to its secular principles.

In January of 1950, Mary Church Terrell, an 86-year-old charter member of the NAACP, headed into Thompson’s Restaurant, just a few blocks from the White House, and requested to be served. She and her companions were informed by the manager that they could not eat in his establishment, because they were “colored.” Terrell, a former suffragette and one of the country’s first college-educated African-American women, took the matter to court. Three years later, the Supreme Court vindicated her outrage: District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co., Inc. was decided in 1953.

The United States of America was founded by ordinary citizens who willingly sacrificed their lives and fortunes in order to hand down the precious legacy of freedom we enjoy today. In American Patriots, Rick Santorum shares the true-life accounts of 25 unsung heroic men and women from the Revolutionary War era. These citizen patriots fought valiantly and made significant sacrifices to secure our God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - not only for themselves, but also for countless future generations.