Select Bibliography of American Religious History

Compiled by Mark Stoll for use by students in HIST 3328

For an excellent overview of important books in American religious history, see Catherine Albanese's American Religious History: A Historiographical Essay, available online as a pdf file, although now a bit dated.

Index

 

General

Albanese, Catherine L. Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Albanese, Catherine L. A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Albanese, Catherine L. The Delight Makers: Anglo-American Metaphysical Religion and the Pursuit of Happiness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023.

Appelbaum, Patricia Faith. St. Francis of America: How a Thirteenth-Century Friar Became America's Most Popular Saint. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Bowler, Kate. Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Bowman, Matthew Burton. Christian: The Politics of a Word in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018.

Coffey, John. Exodus and Liberation Deliverance Politics from John Calvin to Martin Luther King Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Cookson, Catharine. Regulating Religion: The Courts and the Free Exercise Clause. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Cox, Robert S. Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003.

Davies, Owen. America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft After Salem. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

DelFattore, Joan. The Fourth R: Conflicts Over Religion in America's Public Schools. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

Farrelly, Maura Jane. Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Fea, John. The Bible Cause: A History of the American Bible Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Fox, Richard Wightman. Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.

Gin Lum, Kathryn. Heathen: Religion and Race in American History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2022.

Goff, James R. Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Green, Steven K. The Bible, the School, and the Constitution: The Clash That Shaped Modern Church-State Doctrine. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Hackett, David G. That Religion in Which All Men Agree: Freemasonry in American Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.

Hughes, Richard T., and Allen C. Leonard. Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630-1875. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Hutchison, William R. Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

Martínez, Juan Francisco. The Story of Latino Protestants in the United States. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2018.

McCrossen, Alexis. Holy Day, Holiday: The America Sunday. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.

McLoughlin, William Gerald. Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: an essay on religion and social change in America, 1607-1977. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Meyer, Donald B. The Positive Thinkers: A Study of the American Quest for Health, Wealth and Personal Power from Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday 1965.

Mitchell, Scott A. The Making of American Buddhism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.

Moore, R. Laurence. Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Moore, R. Laurence. Touchdown Jesus: The Mixing of Sacred and Secular in American History. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2003.

Noll, Mark A. America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Pike, Sarah M. New Age and Neopagan Religions in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

Poole, W. Scott. Satan in America: The Devil We Know. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009.

Preston, Andrew. Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy. New York: Knopf, 2012.

Prothero, Stephen. American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

Putz, Paul Emory. The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024.

Slominski, Kristy L. Teaching Moral Sex: A History of Religion and Sex Education in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Smith, Gary Scott. Heaven in the American Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Stoll, Mark R. Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Wuthnow, Robert. Red State Religion: Faith and Politics in America's Heartland. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

Wuthnow, Robert. Rough Country: How Texas Became America's Most Powerful Bible-Belt State. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Latter-day Saints (Mormons)

Bushman, Richard L. Joseph Smith’s Gold Plates: A Cultural History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.

Gordon, Sarah Barringer. The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Park, Benjamin E. American Zion: A New History of Mormonism. New York: Liveright, 2024.

Pentecostals and Holiness

Stephens, Randall J. The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Roman Catholics

Carey, Patrick W. Confession: Catholics, Repentance, and Forgiveness in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Dolan, Jay P. In Search of an American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

McGreevy, John T. Catholicism and American Freedom: A History. New York: Norton, 2003.

O’Toole, James M. For I Have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2025.

 

Native Americans

Axtell, James. The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Fisher, Linford D. The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Graber, Jennifer. The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Jortner, Adam Joseph. The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for the American Frontier. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Tarango, Angela. Choosing the Jesus Way: American Indian Pentecostals and the Fight for the Indigenous Principle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

Warren, Louis S. God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America. New York: Basic Books, 2017.

 

Puritans

Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978.

Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Puritan Origins of the American Self. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975.

Bozeman, Theodore Dwight. To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Bunker, Nick. Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.

Cohen, Charles Lloyd. God’s Caress. The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Cooper, James. Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Daniels, Bruce Colin. Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995.

Hall, David D. A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.

Hall, David D. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. New York: Knopf, 1989.

Hambrick-Stowe, Charles E. The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.

Holifield, Brooks. The Covenant Sealed: The Development of Puritan Sacramental Theology in Old and New England, 1570-1720. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974.

Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop. Boston: Little, Brown, 1958.

Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.

Morgan, Edmund S. Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea. New York: New York University Press, 1963.

Stout, Harry S. The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Ulrich, Laurel. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750. New York: Knopf, 1982.

Winship, Michael P. Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Winship, Michael P. Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636-1641. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

 

Colonial Religion

Bonomi, Patricia U. Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society and Politics in Colonial America. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Butler, Jon. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Farrelly, Maura Jane. Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Glasson, Travis. Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Noll, Mark A. In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492–1783. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.

 

The Great Awakening

Bezzant, Rhys S. Jonathan Edwards and the Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Stout, Harry S. The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans, 1991.

Tracy, Patricia J. Jonathan Edwards, Pastor: Religion and Society in Eighteenth-Century Northampton. New York: Hill and Wang, 1980.

 

The Revolutionary Era and Early Republic

Beneke, Chris. Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Bell, James B. A War of Religion: Dissenters, Anglicans, and the American Revolution. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Bloch, Ruth H. Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Byrd, James P. Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Dreisbach, Daniel L. Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Lambert, Frank. The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Miller, Nicholas Patrick. The Religious Roots of the First Amendment: Dissenting Protestants and the Separation of Church and State. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

O’Donnell, Catherine. Elizabeth Seton: American Saint. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2018.

Porterfield, Amanda. Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Ragosta, John A. Wellspring of Liberty: How Virginia's Religious Dissenters Helped Win the American Revolution and Secured Religious Liberty. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

 

The Second Great Awakening

Braude, Anne. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth Century America. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Brekus, Catherine A. Strangers & Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Cross, Whitney R. The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1950.

Davenport, Stewart. Sex and Sects: The Story of Mormon Polygamy, Shaker Celibacy, and Oneida Complex Marriage. of American Spirituality. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022.

Demos, John. The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic. New York: Vintage, 2014.

Gutierrez, Cathy. Plato's Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Haselby, Sam. The Origins of American Religious Nationalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

Heyrman, Christine L. Southern Cross: The Beginning of the Bible Belt. New York: Knopf, 1997.

1987.

Rowe, David L. God’s Strange Work: William Miller and the End of the World. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2008.

Wigger, John H. Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Wigger, John H. American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Williams, Jeffrey. Religion and Violence in Early American Methodism: Taking the Kingdom by Force. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.

Wright, Conrad. The Unitarian Controversy: Essays on American Unitarian History. Boston, Mass.: Skinner House Books, 1994.

Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1969.

Yacovazzi, Cassandra L. True Womanhood and the Campaign Against Convents in Antebellum America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Mormons

Davis, William L. Visions in a Seer Stone: Joseph Smith and the Making of the Book of Mormon. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

Fluhman, J. Spencer. A Peculiar People: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.

Givens, Terryl. By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture That Launched a New World Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Park, Benjamin E. Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier. New York: Liveright, 2020.

 

Transcendentalism

Buehrens, John A. Conflagration: How the Transcendentalists Sparked the American Struggle for Racial, Gender, and Social Justice. Boston: Beacon Press, 2020.

Grodzins, Dean. American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

 

Religion, Slavery, and the Civil War

Byrd, James P. A Holy Baptism of Fire and Blood: The Bible and the American Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Dilbeck, D. H. A More Civil War: How the Union Waged a Just War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

Harper, Matthew. The End of Days: African American Religion and Politics in the Age of Emancipation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

Haynes, Stephen R. Noah's Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Moore, Joseph S. Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Noll, Mark A. The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Oshatz, Molly. Slavery and Sin: The Fight Against Slavery and the Rise of Liberal Protestantism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Rable, George C. God's Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Wilson, Charles Reagan. Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980.

 

Religion in the Nineteenth Century

Abell, Aaron Ignatius. The Urban Impact on American Protestantism, 1865-1900. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1943.

Akenson, Donald H. Exporting the Rapture: John Nelson Darby and the Victorian Conquest of North-American Evangelicalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Avery, Valeen Tippetts. From Mission to Madness: Last Son of the Mormon Prophet. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998.

Boyer, Paul. Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.

Bressler, Ann Lee. The Universalist Movement in America, 1770–1880. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Carter, Paul A. The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971.

Evansen, Bruce J. God's Man for the Gilded Age: D. L. Moody and the Rise of Modern Mass Evangelism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Gin Lum, Kathryn. Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Green, Steven K. The Second Disestablishment: Church and State in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Handy, Robert T. The Protestant Quest for a Christian America, 1830–1930. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967.

Jemison, Elizabeth L. Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

Noll, Mark A. America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794–1911. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.

Nord, David Paul. Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005.

Scott, Donald M. From Office to Profession: The New England Ministry, 1750-1850. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978.

Smith, Timothy Lawrence. Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War. New York: Harper & Row, 1957.

Turner, James. Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.

 

Religion at the Turn of the Twentieth Century and the Social Gospel

Burns, David. The Life and Death of the Radical Historical Jesus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Carter, Heath W. Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Crunden, Robert Morse. Ministers of Reform: The Progressives' Achievement in American Civilization, 1889–1920. New York: Basic Books, 1982.

Drake, Janine Giordano. The Gospel of Church: How Mainline Protestants Vilified Christian Socialism and Fractured the Labor Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024.

Ebel, Jonathan H. Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.

Flake, Kathleen. The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Gloege, Timothy E. W. Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Hopkins, Charles Howard. The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865–1915. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940.

Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925. Second ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Rieser, Andrew Chamberlin. The Chautauqua Moment: Protestants, Progressives, and the Culture of Modern Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

Putney, Clifford. Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Taiz, Lillian. Hallelujah Lads & Lasses: Remaking the Salvation Army in America, 1880–1930. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

White, Ronald C., Jr., and C. Howard Hopkins. The Social Gospel: Religion and Reform in Changing America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976.

Woods, Thomas E. The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholic Intellectuals and the Progressive Era. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

 

Twentieth-Century Religion before World War II

Butler, Jon. God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020.

Cauthen, Kenneth. The Impact of American Religious Liberalism. 2nd ed. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1983.

Carter, Paul A. The Decline and Revival of the Social Gospel: Social and Political Liberalism in American Protestant Churches, 1920-1940. Hamden, Ct.: Archon Books, 1971.

Coffman, Elesha J. The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Griffith, R. Marie. Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics. New York: Basic Books, 2017.

Hangen, Tona J. Redeeming the Dial: Radio, Religion, and Popular Culture in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Hedstrom, Matthew S. The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Hutchison, William R. The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976.

May, Isaac Barnes. God-Optional Religion in Twentieth-Century America: Quakers, Unitarians, Reconstructionist Jews, and the Crisis Over Theism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.

Meyer, Donald. The Protestant Search for Political Realism, 1919–1941. 2nd ed. Middletown, Ct.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988.

Orsi, Robert. The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950. 3rd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010 [1985].

Romanowski, William D. Reforming Hollywood: How American Protestants Fought for Freedom at the Movies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Rosen, Christine. Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Sutton, Matthew Avery. American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Wacker, Grant. Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

 

Religion since World War II

Barba, Lloyd Daniel. Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.

Bullivant, Stephen. Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and America since Vatican II. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Cajka, Peter. Follow Your Conscience: The Catholic Church and the Spirit of the Sixties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021.

Chidester, David. Salvation and Suicide: Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown. Revised Edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003 (1988).

Griffith, R. Marie. Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics. New York: Basic Books, 2017.

Henold, Mary J. Catholic and Feminist: The Surprising History of the American Catholic Feminist Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

Herzog, Jonathan P. The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America's Religious Battle against Communism in the Early Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Kranson, Rachel. Ambivalent Embrace: Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar America. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

Lane, Christopher. Surge of Piety: Norman Vincent Peale and the Remaking of American Religious Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.

Nabhan-Warren, Kristy. The Cursillo Movement in America: Catholics, Protestants, and Fourth-Day Spirituality. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

O'Donnell, Mary Ellen. Ingrained Habits: Growing Up Catholic in Mid-Twentieth-Century America. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2018.

Petro, Anthony Michael. After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Putz, Paul Emory. The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024.

White, Heather Rachelle. Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Whitt, Jacqueline E. Bringing God to Men: American Military Chaplains and the Vietnam War. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

Wuthnow, Robert. The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Wuthnow, Robert. After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Wuthnow, Robert. After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Liberal Protestantism: Civil Rights and Protest Movements

Gasaway, Brantley W. Progressive Evangelicals and the Pursuit of Social Justice. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

Peters, Shawn Francis. The Catonsville Nine: A Story of Faith and Resistance in the Vietnam Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Conservative and Evangelical Protestantism

Boyer, Paul S. When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Dochuk, Darren. From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism. New York: Norton, 2011.

Eskridge, Larry. God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Flippen, J. Brooks. Jimmy Carter, the Politics of Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011.

Hawkins, J. Russell. The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Hummel, Daniel G. The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2023.

Lahr, Angela M. Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic Nightmares: The Cold War Origins of Political Evangelicalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Locke, Joseph L. Making the Bible Belt: Texas Prohibitionists and the Politicization of Southern Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Miller, Steven P. The Age of Evangelicalism: America’s Born-Again Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Sinitiere, Phillip Luke. Salvation with a Smile: Joel Osteen, Lakewood Church, and American Christianity. New York: New York University Press, 2015.

Stephens, Randall J. The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ’n’ Roll. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018.

Stockhausen, Ulrike Elisabeth. The Strangers in Our Midst: American Evangelicals and Immigration from the Cold War to the Twenty-First Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Stowe, David W. No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Turner, John G. Bill Bright & Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

Wigger, John H. PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Evangelical Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Williams, Daniel K. God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

 

Business and Religion

Grem, Darren E. The Blessings of Business: How Corporations Shaped Conservative Christianity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Kruse, Kevin Michael. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. New York: Basic Books, 2015.

Moore, R. Laurence. Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Moreton, Bethany. To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009.

May, Henry F. Protestant Churches and Industrial America. New York: Harper, 1949.

 

Women

Butler, Anthea D. Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Coburn, Carol K., and Martha Smith. Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Johnson, Emily Suzanne. This Is Our Message: Women’s Leadership in the New Christian Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Nadell, Pamela Susan. America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today. New York: Norton, 2020.

 

African Americans

Adams, Betty Livingston. Black Women’s Christian Activism: Seeking Social Justice in a Northern Suburb. New York: New York University Press, 2016.

Best, Wallace D. Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Botham, Fay. Almighty God Created the Races: Christianity, Interracial Marriage, & American Law. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Chappell, David L. A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Collier-Thomas, Bettye. Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion. New York: Knopf, 2010.   

Cressler, Matthew J. Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration. New York: New York University Press, 2017.

Curtis, Edward E. Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Islam, 1960-1975. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Dorman, Jacob S. Chosen People: The Rise of American Black Israelite Religions. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Felber, Garrett. Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

Frey, Sylvia R., and Betty Wood. Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Harper, Matthew. The End of Days: African American Religion and Politics in the Age of Emancipation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

Jackson, Jerma A. Singing in My Soul: Black Gospel Music in a Secular Age. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Johnson, Karen J. One in Christ: Chicago Catholics and the Quest for Interracial Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Kidd, Colin. The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Newman, Richard S. Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers. New York: New York University Press, 2008.

Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Salvatore, Nick. Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America. New York: Little, Brown, 2005.

Sernett, Milton C. Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

 

Science and Religion

Bozeman, Theodore Dwight. Protestants in an Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal and Ante-bellum American Religious Thought. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977.

Hovenkamp, Herbert. Science and Religion in America, 1800-1860. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978.

Larson, Edward J. Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Moore, James R. The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Stephens, Lester D. Science, Race, and Religion in the American South: John Bachman and the Charleston Circle of Naturalists, 1815-1895. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

 

Missions

Cowan, Benjamin A. Moral Majorities across the Americas: Brazil, the United States, and the Creation of the Religious Right. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2021.

Demos, John. The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic. New York: Vintage, 2014.

Heyrman, Christine Leigh. American Apostles: When Evangelicals Entered the World of Islam. New York: Hill and Wang, 2015.

Strasburg, James D. God’s Marshall Plan: American Protestants and the Struggle for the Soul of Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Tyrrell, Ian R. Reforming the World: The Creation of America's Moral Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.

Walther, Karine V. Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821-1921. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.


This page was last edited Monday, November 3, 2025.