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This book provides a fresh, in-depth examination of the Revival of 1857-58, a widespread religious awakening most famous for urban prayer meetings in major metropolitan centers across the United States. Often mentioned in religious history texts and articles but overshadowed by scholarly attention ...

This book provides a fresh, in-depth examination of the Revival of 1857-58, a widespread religious awakening most famous for urban prayer meetings in major metropolitan centers across the United States. Often mentioned in religious history texts and articles but overshadowed by scholarly attention to the first and second "Great Awakenings," the revival has lacked a critical, book-length analysis. This study will help to fill this gap and to place the event within the context of Protestant revival traditions in America. The Revival of 1857-58 was a multifaceted religious movement that Long suggests may have been the closest thing to a truly national revival in American history. The awakening marked the coming together of formalist and populist evangelical groups, particularly in urban areas, and helped to create the beginnings of a transdenominational religious identity among middle-class American evangelicals. Long explores the revival from various angles, emphasizing the importance of historiography and examining the way Calvinist clergy and the editors of the daily press canonized particular versions of the revival story, most notably its role in the history of great awakenings and its character as a masculine "businessmen's revival." She gives attention to grassroots perspectives on the awakening and also pursues wider social and cultural questions, including whether the revival actually affected evangelical involvement in social reform. The book combines insights from contemporary scholarship concerning revivals, women's history, and nineteenth-century mass print with extensive primary source research. The result is a clearly written study that blends careful description with nuanced analysis.

American culture was firmly undergirded by two dominant rhetorics during the nineteenth century: manifest destiny and domesticity. The first celebrated a divinely ordained spread of democracy, individualism, capitalism, and civilization throughout the North American continent. The second codified ...

American culture was firmly undergirded by two dominant rhetorics during the nineteenth century: manifest destiny and domesticity. The first celebrated a divinely ordained spread of democracy, individualism, capitalism, and civilization throughout the North American continent. The second codified "natural" differences and duties of American men and women.

While the two rhetorics were touted as "universal" in their application and appeal, in actuality both assumed a belief in masculine Anglo-Saxon American superiority. The triumph of the nation could be accomplished only through the concomitant removal, acculturation, or elimination of nonwhite peoples and through a careful circumscription of white women. The rhetorics not only were linked through a virulent ethnocentrism and misogyny but also were connected through their reliance on the Protestant belief system and on the church itself.

Yet, curiously, despite their exclusion from the Protestant rhetorics of manifest destiny and domesticity, the nineteenth century featured a remarkable growth in the conversion of women and nonwhite men to the Protestant faith. Why did women and nonwhite men seek to join a dominant religion that in many ways set out to limit and oppress them?

This book responds to that question by exploring the actual words and rhetorical choices made by some of the most progressive Protestant white, African-American, and Native American thinkers of the era: Olaudah Equiano, William Apess, Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sojourner Truth, and Amanda Berry Smith. It argues that American Protestantism was both prohibitive and constitutive, offering its followers an expedient, acceptable but limited means forassuming social and political power and for forming a mutually empathetic, relational notion of self while at the same time foreclosing the possibility for more radical roles and social change.

The Antichrist, though mentioned a mere four times in the Bible, and then only obscurely, has exercised a tight hold on popular imagination throughout history. This has been particularly true in the U.S., says author Robert C. Fuller, where Americans have tended to view our nation as uniquely ...

The Antichrist, though mentioned a mere four times in the Bible, and then only obscurely, has exercised a tight hold on popular imagination throughout history. This has been particularly true in the U.S., says author Robert C. Fuller, where Americans have tended to view our nation as uniquely blessed by God--a belief that leaves us especially prone to demonizing our enemies. In Naming the Antichrist, Fuller takes us on a fascinating journey through the dark side of the American religious psyche, from the earliest American colonists right up to contemporary fundamentalists such as Pat Robertson and Hal Lindsey. Fuller begins by offering a brief history of the idea of the Antichrist and its origins in the apocalyptic thought in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and traces the eventual 71Gws how the colonists saw Antichrist personified in native Americans and French Catholics, in Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, and the witches of Salem, in the Church of England and the King. He looks at the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century, showing how such prominent Americans as Yale president Timothy Dwight and the Reverend Jedidiah Morse (father of Samuel Morse) saw the work of the Antichrist in phenomena ranging from the French Revolution to Masonry. In the twentieth century, he finds a startling array of hate-mongers--from Gerald Winrod (who vilified Roosevelt as a pawn of the Antichrist) to the Ku Klux Klan--who drew on apocalyptic imagery in their attacks on Jews, Catholics, blacks, socialists, and others. Finally, Fuller considers contemporary fundamentalist writers such as Hal Lindsey (author of The Late Great Planet Earth, with some 19 million copies sold), Mary Stewart Relfe (whose candidates for the Antichrist have included such figures as Henry Kissinger, Pope John Paul II, and Anwar Sadat), and a host of others who have found Antichrist in the sinister guise of the European Economic Community, the National Council of Churches, feminism, New Age religions, and even supermarket barcodes and fibre optics (the latter functioning as "the eye of the Antichrist"). Throughout, Fuller reveals in vivid detail how our unique American obsession with the Antichrist reflects the struggle to understand ourselves--and our enemies--within the mythic context of the battle of absolute good versus absolute evil. From the Scofield Reference Bible (no other book had greater impact on the American Antichrist tradition) to the Scopes Monkey Trial, Fuller provides an informative and often startling look at a thread that weaves persistently throughout American religious and cultural life.

This study assesses the political effects of the Second Vatican Council on the politics of American Catholics. After discussing Catholic contributions to political development since the Middle Ages, Gelm argues that changes since Vatican II signify a major departure from the Church's authoritarian ...

This study assesses the political effects of the Second Vatican Council on the politics of American Catholics. After discussing Catholic contributions to political development since the Middle Ages, Gelm argues that changes since Vatican II signify a major departure from the Church's authoritarian and anti-democratic actions of the past. Among the most significant changes has been the increased political activism of America's Catholic bishops. Gelm has surveyed the political attitudes of U.S. Catholic bishops and investigated their political values and motives. Emphasizing the way in which religion adapts and changes, the study provides a valuable consideration of the tensions within the U.S. Catholic Church since Vatican II and the political impact of Vatican II.