Quest for a Christian America, 1800–1865

Quest for a Christian America, 1800–1865
Author: David Edwin Harrell
Publisher: University Alabama Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2003-09-29
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0817350748

The definitive social history of the Disciples of Christ in the 19th century The Disciples of Christ, led by reformers such as Alexander Campbell and Barton W. Stone, was one of a number of early-19th-century primitivist religious movements seeking to “restore the ancient order of things.” The Disciples movement was little more than a loose collection of independent congregations until the middle of the 19th century, but by 1900 three clear groupings of churches had appeared. Today, more than 5 million Americans—members of the modern-day Disciples of Christ (Christian Church), Independent Christian Churches, and Churches of Christ, among others—trace their religious heritage to this “Restoration Movement.”

The Cost of Unity

The Cost of Unity
Author: Lawrence A. Q. Burnley
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2008
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780881461343

Like other Protestant organizations in the US, the Christian Church was involved in the establishment of schools for African Americans in the South in the years following the end of the Civil War. This book examines the agency of African Americans in the founding of educational institutions for blacks associated with the Christian Church.

Presidential Faith and Foreign Policy

Presidential Faith and Foreign Policy
Author: W. Steding
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2014-11-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1137477113

This book explores the relationship between the religious beliefs of presidents and their foreign policymaking. Through the application of a new methodological approach that provides a cognetic narrative of each president, this study reveals the significance of religion's impact on U.S. foreign policy.

Who Rules the Synagogue?

Who Rules the Synagogue?
Author: Zev Eleff
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2016-06-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0190490284

Finalist for the American Jewish Studies cateogry of the 2016 National Jewish Book Awards Early in the 1800s, American Jews consciously excluded rabbinic forces from playing a role in their community's development. By the final decades of the century, ordained rabbis were in full control of America's leading synagogues and large sectors of American Jewish life. How did this shift occur? Who Rules the Synagogue? explores how American Jewry in the nineteenth century was transformed from a lay dominated community to one whose leading religious authorities were rabbis. Zev Eleff traces the history of this revolution, culminating in the Pittsburgh rabbinical conference of 1885 and the commotion caused by it. Previous scholarship has chartered the religious history of American Judaism during this era, but Eleff reinterprets this history through the lens of religious authority. In so doing, he offers a fresh view of the story of American Judaism with the aid of never-before-mined sources and a comprehensive review of periodicals and newspapers. Eleff weaves together the significant episodes and debates that shaped American Judaism during this formative period, and places this story into the larger context of American religious history and modern Jewish history.

Race and Restoration

Race and Restoration
Author: Barclay Key
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2020-05-06
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0807173096

From the late nineteenth century to the dawn of the civil rights era, the Churches of Christ operated outside of conventional racial customs. Many of their congregations, even deep in the South, counted whites and blacks among their numbers. As the civil rights movement began to challenge pervasive social views about race, Church of Christ leaders and congregants found themselves in the midst of turmoil. In Race and Restoration: Churches of Christ and the Black Freedom Struggle, Barclay Key focuses on how these churches managed race relations during the Jim Crow era and how they adapted to the dramatic changes of the 1960s. Although most religious organizations grappled with changing attitudes toward race, the Churches of Christ had singular struggles. Fundamentally “restorationist,” these exclusionary churches perceived themselves as the only authentic expression of Christianity, compelling them to embrace peoples of different races, even as they succumbed to prevailing racial attitudes. The Churches of Christ thus offer a unique perspective for observing how Christian fellowship and human equality intersected during the civil rights era. Key reveals how racial attitudes and practices within individual congregations elude the simple categorizations often employed by historians. Public forums, designed by churches to bridge racial divides, offered insight into the minds of members while revealing the limited progress made by individual churches. Although the Churches of Christ did have a more racially diverse composition than many other denominations in the Jim Crow era, Key shows that their members were subject to many of the same aversions, prejudices, and fears of other churches of the time. Ironically, the tentative biracial relationships that had formed within and between congregations prior to World War II began to dissolve as leading voices of the civil rights movement prioritized desegregation.

The Oxford Handbook of Church and State in the United States

The Oxford Handbook of Church and State in the United States
Author: Derek H. Davis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 592
Release: 2010-10-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0199716935

Study of church and state in the United States is incredibly complex. Scholars working in this area have backgrounds in law, religious studies, history, theology, and politics, among other fields. Historically, they have focused on particular angles or dimensions of the church-state relationship, because the field is so vast. The results have mostly been monographs that focus only on narrow cross-sections of the field, and the few works that do aim to give larger perspectives are reference works of factual compendia, which offer little or no analysis. The Oxford Handbook of Church and State in the United States fills this gap, presenting an extensive, multidimensional overview of the field. Twenty-one essays offer a scholarly look at the intricacies and past and current debates that frame the American system of church and state, within five main areas: history, law, theology/philosophy, politics, and sociology. These essays provide factual accounts, but also address issues, problems, debates, controversies, and, where appropriate, suggest resolutions. They also offer analysis of the range of interpretations of the subject offered by various American scholars. This Handbook is an invaluable resource for the study of church-state relations in the United States.

America's Book

America's Book
Author: Mark A. Noll
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 865
Release: 2022
Genre: Bible
ISBN: 0197623468

"This book shows how the Bible decisively shaped American national history even as that history decisively influenced the use of Scripture. It explores the rise of a strongly Protestant Bible civilization in the early United States that was then fractured by debates over slavery, contested by growing numbers of non-Protestant Americans (Catholics, Jews, agnostics), and torn apart by the Civil War. Scripture survived as a significant, though fragmented, force in the more religiously plural period from Reconstruction to the early twentieth century. Throughout, the book pays special attention to how the same Bible shone as hope for black Americans while supporting other Americans who justified white supremacy"--

Recovering the Margins of American Religious History

Recovering the Margins of American Religious History
Author: B. Dwain Waldrep
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Total Pages: 158
Release: 2012-04-03
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0817357084

Harrell's connections with these religious movements point to his deeper ongoing concerns with class, gender, and race as core factors behind religious institutions, and he has unblinkingly investigated a wide range of social dynamics.

The Stone-Campbell Movement

The Stone-Campbell Movement
Author: D. Newell Williams
Publisher: Chalice Press
Total Pages: 678
Release: 2013-03-30
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0827235275

The Stone-Campbell Movement: A Global History tells the story of Christians from around the globe and across time who have sought to witness faithfully to the gospel of reconciliation. Transcending theological differences by drawing from all the major streams of the movement, this foundational book documents the movement's humble beginnings on the American frontier and growth into international churches of the twenty-first century.

The Myth of the Stone-Campbell Movement

The Myth of the Stone-Campbell Movement
Author: Jim Cook
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2019-09-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1498595626

The Stone-Campbell Movement was created in 1832 when Barton Stone’s “Christ-ians” from the West merged with Alexander Campbell’s “Reforming Baptists.” By the beginning of the Civil War it was the sixth largest religious movement in the United States, and in the twentieth century the movement split into the three main branches that exist today. In recent years, scholars from these branches have worked to better understand their nineteenth-century roots, creating the historical sub-field “restoration history” in which historians and other scholars debate the influence of Stone and Campbell on specific characteristics of the existing branches. Bringing new insight into that debate, Jim Cook uses the writings of both Stone and Campbell to show that Stone was not a viable leader of the movement after 1832 and that his ideas were not part of what influenced the twentieth-century branches of the movement. This study demonstrates that the debates going on between “restoration historians” are thus predicated on the false assumption that Stone influenced people within his movements and proves that Stone was an outsider in the movement that bears his name.