Academic disciplines, like the people who study them, have life cycles.

If history and sociology lack bat mitzvahs and Sweet Sixteens, they nonetheless have rituals to mark their milestones. The "state-of-the-field" essays in two recent books, New Directions in American Religious History, edited by Harry S. Stout and D. G. Hart, and Retelling U.S. Religious History, edited by Thomas Tweed, are such markers.

"A minihistoriographical revolution has occurred in studies of American religion over the past 20 years as they have proliferated at the epicenter of the historical and sociological enterprises," proclaim Stout and Robert M. Taylor, Jr., at the beginning of the first essay in New Directions. "Religious history has entered the mainstream of historical research." The field, in short, has come of age. But lest those of us who study American religion decide it is time to rest on our laurels, these two collections, along with David D. Hall's Lived Religion in America, have come to remind us that there is still much work to be done.

Taken together, New Directions in American Religious History and Retelling U.S. Religious History offer an invaluable assessment of where the study of American religion has been, and where it needs to go from here. Although the books share certain overlapping themes and questions, they are remarkably unalike. Readers familiar with the editors' earlier work will not be surprised by the differences in tenor. Stout's important study, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England, made an invaluable contribution to a well-established, ongoing scholarly discussion. By contrast, Tweed's first book, The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844-1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent, set out to tell a new story. The same can be said for the collections they have edited. The essays in the Stout and Hart volume reconsider—sometimes radically—our understanding of familiar people, places, and events in American religion; whereas in Tweed's volume, the reader meets characters and is ushered into spaces he has never encountered before.

Consider, by way of example, the books' treatments of Protestantism. Protestantism is the organizing principle behind New Directions, as the reader learns in even a quick glance at the subject headings: "Protestantism and Region," "The Stages of American Protestantism," "Protestantism and the Mainstream," and "Protestantism and Outsiders." Tweed's collection, on the other hand, explicitly moves away from Protestantism. As Tweed states in his introduction, the contributors think that understanding the history of Protestantism is important "because Protestants have had great power … but it has often been presented as the only story. Concomitantly, other stories, with other motifs and plots, have not been told." It is those untold stories that interest Tweed.

Even when the two volumes begin with the same assumption, it is clear that Retelling U.S. Religious History is the more daring of the two. For example, each of the editors understands region as an important lens for viewing American religion. In Stout and Hart, we are treated to fresh perspectives on familiar regions: colonial New England, the South, Canada. In Tweed's volume, we head north to Canada as well, but we also explore the Pacific Rim, and the South we learn about is not that of Nat Turner and Jesse Daniel Ames, but that of the Muskogee Creek Indians (parts of present-day Georgia and Alabama).

New Directions in American Religious History
edited by Harry S. Stout
and D. G. Hart
Oxford Univ. Press
502 pp.; $45, hardcover; $19.95, paper

Similarly, while both volumes are concerned with discussing "outsiders," New Directions considers the three most familiar "outsider" groups: African Americans, Catholics, and Jews. In Retelling, we meet Pueblo Indians, Sandwich Islanders, and Tibetan monks. In short, the titles of these two collections are fitting. While Tweed sets out to tell a new tale, Stout and Hart are more concerned with refining the stories we have.

But refine the old stories New Directions does. Two essays in particular—David D. Hall's and Jon Butler's— challenge readers to rethink two of the most well-established stories in American religion. In "Narrating Puritanism," Hall convincingly argues that the existing historiography of Puritanism presents too tidy a picture. Historians have portrayed Puritan New England as a place where "religion was a matter of strong rules," when, in fact, those rules were, "in practice, not so strong after all." Hall shows that even those characteristics commonly considered the hallmarks of Puritanism are up for grabs: for example, according to Hall, the "visible saint," a stock character of colonial New England, was, in fact, a contested figure.

Pick up your handy guide to Puritanism—or eavesdrop on any college class discussing the matter—and you will learn that visible saints were the regenerate Christians who, in accordance with chapters 3 and 9 of the Cambridge Platform, had made a public confession of their conversion experiences, and were thereby admitted into church membership and thought by all to approximate saints in actuality. But Hall shows that for Puritans, the "meaning of 'visible saint' … [was] remarkably indeterminate." Being declared a saint, in fact, merely placed a Puritan somewhere on a scale that ran from saved, regenerate Christian to downright hypocrite who had fabricated his conversion narrative.

Hall complicates our understanding not just of saints, but of Puritan communion, Puritan conversions, and a whole host of other supposed benchmarks of Puritanism. He throws the denominational framework that has long guided many studies of Puritanism out the window. He offers a much needed corrective to the pervasive idea that in early New England, religion and society were synonymous.

Take Hall seriously, and your whole understanding of Puritanism is reconfigured. "Continuities and discontinuities, a bounded whole but also fragments, negotiation over boundaries and the recurrent fashioning of a 'middle way': such were the characteristics of religion as a culture" among Puritans, Hall declares at the outset of his essay. If we are skeptical at first, anticipating the old postmodern shuffle whereby everything is said to be indeterminate and nothing is fixed, by the end of his essay Hall has convinced us, and we are nodding vigorously in assent with his call for a more "multilayered" history of Puritanism, one that recognizes that "the play of meanings was remarkably fluid even with regard to such crucial issues as the nature of church membership and the nature of the sacraments," one that acknowledges that "religion as practiced, religion as it unfolds within boundaries or rules, is always and everywhere caught up in negotiations."

If Hall manages to recast decades of Puritan historiography in a mere 40 pages, Jon Butler does the same for the study of urban Protestantism. "Two themes—and one relationship—dominate historians' work on Protestantism and the city between 1870 and 1920," Butler writes: "urbanization, Protestant decline, and the implicit causal connection between them." Protestantism, the traditional story goes, just couldn't hack the urban world. "Protestantism had not solved the urban religious problem," summed up Aaron Abell in one landmark study of Protestants and the city. Despite churchmen's efforts, Paul Boyer concluded in another, "the 'urban problem' remained," and institutional Protestantism's "day had passed" in the cities.

Not so fast, Butler says. Protestantism not only survived in the city, it might even be shown to have succeeded, if not flourished, there. Drawing primarily on a set of religious surveys conducted by the Federation of Churches and Christian Workers of New York City, Butler demonstrates a "remarkable Protestant resilience amidst the late nineteenth-century spiritual crises." At least in numerical terms, the Protestant church was not a failure in the American city between the Civil War and World War I. Butler's research shows an "expansion in adherence to religious institutions" between 1890 and 1916 in five American cities—Atlanta, New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Chicago. In comparison both to what Gilded Age Protestant leaders like Josiah Strong and Samuel Loomis had predicted, and to the staggeringly swift decline of institutional religious affiliation in the urban centers of Europe, Protestantism fared quite well in American cities.

The essays in Thomas Tweed's collection propose to reshape our understanding of American religion in an even more bold and fundamental way. Although it has been the trend in recent decades to include previously marginalized people in our histories—as Stout and Hart put it in their introduction, "the language of outsiders-become-insiders … is now a commonplace"—some scholars are content merely to paste new subjects into the background of an unchanged picture. But the scholars in Retelling U.S. Religious History rightly insist on showing that "outsiders," to alter the metaphor, are more than just raisins in a cake. As Joel W. Martin puts it in his essay "Indians, Contact, and Colonialism in the Deep South," simply "tacking Indians on or splicing them into our narratives" is not enough: When we really take seriously Indians (or Muslims, or Italian Americans, or Mormons), the result is a radical reorientation in our understanding of American religious history.

Anne Braude's essay, "Women's History Is American Religious History," offers the clearest example of such a reorientation. Braude shows that when women are placed at the center of the story, it becomes clear that three of the most persistent models in the historiography of American religion—declension, feminization, and secularization—are, to put it bluntly, all wrong. "From an empirical perspective, they never happened," writes Braude, explaining that "their popularity as organizing ideas seems to reveal more about historians' and churchmen's anxieties about the role of religion in American society, anxieties closely tied to women's numerical dominance in churches, synagogues, and temples."

Indeed, the task facing Tweed and his contributors is larger than simply convincing the reader how what Maffly-Kipp calls these "new (to most of us) actors" change the story of the past. There is also the question of how historians must change their way of telling about the past in order to accommodate the new dramatis personae. That is, a methodological challenge accompanies the unfamiliar people and places. As William Westfall writes in his essay about Canada, "To call for the inclusion of characters who were not privileged by the older stories begs the question of the terms on which they can be welcomed into American history. While one can imagine that some groups and regions within America can be accommodated by adopting a more pluralistic notion of America and American culture, some might find it singularly difficult simply to pull up another chair at the rich banquet of American culture."

Retelling U.S. Religious History
edited by Thomas A. Tweed
Univ. of California Press
302 pp.; $40, hardcover; $13.95, paper

Reconfiguring national history so that it takes account of difference is a methodological conundrum that Retelling does not solve. Nonetheless, the contributors hint provocatively at ways we might begin to tackle this methodological problem.

Martin sketches two alternative visions of a postcolonial narrative of American history that takes contact and colonialism seriously: a sweeping chronological narrative that begins around 1200, and, reminiscent of Norman Davies's Heart of Europe, a narrative that begins last week (or maybe in 1990, with the U.S. Supreme Court case Oregon v. Smith, involving a state employee's dismissal from work because of his participation in Native American peyote ritual) and works its way backward, illuminating, in reverse, how we got from there to here. Ann Taves, in her essay on sexuality and American religion, offers an exemplary discussion of how to approach religion and sexuality "within a framework of state formation" without "reproducing a traditional narrative structure."

William Westfall provides the most intriguing suggestion yet for dealing with what legal theorist Martha Minnow has called the "dilemma of difference": Canada's religious history can be useful to students of American religion, Westfall argues, because Canadian historians have long been grappling with the incorporation of difference into national histories. "In Canada," Westfall suggests, "the writing of national histories always has had to face up to basic structural differences. … [Canadians] had to confront right from the start several radical dualities—French and English, Protestant and Catholic, native and newcomer, centre and periphery, worker and owner." Hence, Canadian historians have been "forced … to adopt metaphors and language that acknowledge the reality of basic and perhaps irreconcilable differences." If Americans and American historians are searching for a way to understand difference within a national identity, we would do well to pay attention to our northern neighbor.

Methodological questions also lie at the center of Lived Religion in America. This collection offers a glimpse of what it might mean if scholars of American religion cultivated an approach to religion that has long been prominent among French sociologists, but that is relatively novel on this side of the Atlantic: lived religion (la religion vecue). Hall's lucid introduction, along with Robert Orsi's and Daniele Hervieu-Leger's explicitly historiographical essays, articulate how lived religion might work in an American setting; the rest of the essays show us that this method can illuminate a variety of American contexts, from twentieth-century homesteading to Gilded Age cremation.

Lived religion is concerned, above all else, with the practice of religion, with what people do. In this way, Orsi tells us, lived religion is radically empiricist. Like Tweed, the contributors to this collection are interested in relocating religious life, but whereas the pieces in Retelling U.S. Religious History take us to regions of the country with which we may be unfamiliar, these essays draw us into the quotidian, as lived religion is concerned not only with churches and shrines but also with offices and kitchen tables. Each of the essays focuses on laity, be they North Bronx Catholics drinking from the holy fountain at Saint Lucy's, hymn-belting Native Americans, Puritan families seeking baptism for their children, or suburban charismatic women praying in the Aglow fellowship.

If lived religion sounds similar to popular religion—the study of which has exploded in the past two decades—there are important, if subtle, differences between the two. Scholars who helped develop the study of popular religion, including Hall himself, often drew distinctions between high culture and low, between elite and common. The scholars who have contributed to this collection call that dichotomy into question. Leigh Eric Schmidt puts it best in his essay on nineteenth-century gift giving. Explaining why he pays such close attention to two "luminaries," Ralph Waldo Emerson and Caroline Kirkland, Schmidt reminds us that "practices should not be separated from the ideas that inform them, nor should intellectuals, clergy, and theologians be treated as somehow outside the pale of lived religion."

At its core, Hall explains, lived religion "encompasses the tensions … which are constituted within every religious tradition and that are always present in how people choose to act." Readers will recognize, in Hall's explanation of lived religion, not a few catch phrases from his analysis of Puritanism discussed above: the play of meanings, contest, and negotiation are key ideas in both pieces, for what Hall is calling for in his analysis of Puritanism is no less than a study that understands Puritanism as lived religion.

Two questions arise from these books: content and form. Put another way, what stories—peopled by which characters—will we tell, and how will we tell them? Of the two, the first question is far more familiar to historians—and more familiar to history buffs, as well: recall that it was this question that galvanized the bitter debates over the National History Standards. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the question of content has been the central question for American historians—and American pundits—in recent years.

Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice
edited by David D. Hall
Princeton Univ. Press
254 pp.; $49.50,
hardcover; $16.95, paper

If these three books are proof that historians have not reached a consensus about that question, they indicate that students of American religion are now beginning to devote considerably more attention to the question of narrative structure. This is not a new line of inquiry—thinkers from Voltaire to Ricoeur and historians from Fernand Braudel to Lewis Namier have long been concerned with questions of narrative; but it is a question that has particular resonance for scholars who are increasingly aware that the old forms of telling do not illuminate the new stories any better than the old stories illuminate the American past (or present).

As historian Peter Burke once noted, "Traditional narrative passes over important aspects of the past which it is simply unable to accommodate." The authors considered here have, thankfully, taken up Burke's challenge.

Religious coming-of-age ceremonies are always tainted by a certain fear: that the newly "adult" (read teenage) members of the community have really been forced into the whole thing by their parents and will never darken the church's door again. Not once have I attended a bar mitzvah or a confirmation ceremony where the rabbi or minister has failed to exhort the adolescents before him to remember that the day celebrates not the end of mandatory Hebrew lessons or memorization of Bible verses but rather an embrace of obligations—a beginning, not an ending. Similarly, these books mark a certain arrival of the study of American religion, but they also attest to how much remains undone.

The essays in Retelling U.S. Religious History are more precis to books still unwritten than definitive statements; Butler's essay, and the others in New Directions in American Religious History, ought to inspire a shelf full of studies; and Lived Religion in America is a tantalizing taste of what la religion vecue promises to bring to the study of religion in the United States. A friend of mine who is an Episcopal priest always speaks on the same theme at confirmations, and it is no less appropriate here: "Many Miles to Go Before I Sleep."

Lauren F. Winner is Kellett Scholar at Clare College, University of Cambridge.

Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture . For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.