In light of the curious compulsion to stress Protestant dominance in America's past, this book takes an unorthodox look at religious history in America. Rather than focusing on the usual mainstream Protestant churches--Episcopal, Congregationalist, Methodist, Baptist, and Lutheran--Moore instead turns his attention to the equally important "outsiders" in the American religious experience and tests the realities of American religious pluralism against their history in America. Through separate but interrelated chapters on seven influential groups of "outsiders"--the Mormons, Catholics, Jews,...

Religion in America is up for sale. The products range from a plethora of merchandise in questionable taste--such as Bible-based diet books (More of Jesus. Less of Me), Rapture T-shirts (one features a basketball game with half its players disappearing in the Rapture--the caption is -Fast Break-), and bumper stickers and Frisbees with inspirational messages--to the unabashed consumerism of Jim Bakker's Heritage USA, a grandiose Christian theme park with giant water slide, shopping mall, and office complex. We tend to think of these phenomena--which also include a long line of...

This book is an intriguing narrative of the interplay between American religion and patterns of American culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. R. Laurence Moore considers the ways nationalism, the separation of church and state, democratic pluralism, and shifts in boundaries between secular and sacred practice have shaped American religion for the past two hundred years.

The notion of an American Century has fallen out of favor in recent years historians prefer to focus on the United States as part of a transatlantic community. The contributors to this volume edited by R. Laurence Moore and Maurizio Vaudagna seek to understand how the exercise of American power was in crucial ways shaped and limited by the historic ties of the United States to Europe. They evaluate the impact of the "American Century" (as publisher Henry R. Luce named it in 1941) from Woodrow Wilson's dream of a new world order, to Cold War economic policies, to more recent American cultural...