Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans / Edition 1

by R. Laurence Moore

Overview

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, Christian Scientists, Millennialists, 20th-century Protestant Fundamentalists, and the African-American churches--Moore shows that what was going on in mainstream churches may not have been the "normal" religious experience at all, and that many of these "outside" groups embodied values that were, in fact, quintessentially American.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195051889
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	12/03/1987
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	8.54(w) x 5.54(h) x 0.73(d)

About the Author

Cornell University

Table of Contents

	Introduction: Protestant Unity and the American Mission--The Historiography of a Desire	3
Part 1	Outsider Religions, Ethnicity, and American Identity
Chapter 1	How To Become a People: The Mormon Scenario	25
Chapter 2	Managing Catholic Success in a Protestant Empire	48
Chapter 3	American Jews as an Ordinary Minority	72
Part 2	The Progressive's Despair--Religions for Average Americans
Chapter 4	Christian Science and American Popular Religion	105
Chapter 5	Premillennial Christian Views of God's Justice and American Injustice	128
Chapter 6	The Protestant Majority as a Lost Generation--A Look at Fundamentalism	150
Chapter 7	Black Culture and Black Churches--The Quest for an Autonomous Identity	173
	Postscript: Civil and Uncivil Religions--Describing Religious Pluralism	201
	Notes	211
	Index	237

Editorial Reviews

"Relentlessly honest in his sympathetic examination of group after group."—The New York Times Book Review

"[A] very important and provocative book."—Religious Studies Review

"[Moore's] knowledge is...enyclopedic and insight recurrently arresting."—Times Higher Education Supplement

"This group of essays is perhaps the most...instructive new interpretation to appear in the field of American religious history in a decade."—American Quarterly

"This well-written, well-argued book raises important questions to sort out our confusion of tongues. It is in the best sense provocative."—The Catholic Historical Review

"Should be required reading for American students of new religions. It challenges several premises widely accepted by sociologists working in this area."—Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion

"[A] provocative book....Heightens our appreciation of the ingenuity and organizational genius of such founders as Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy and Charles T. Russell....Its telegraphic and tantalizing style will surely spark innumerable and fevered discussions on the connection between pluralism and religious originality and deviance."—Cithara

"[A] scholarly and insightful volume."—CHOICE

"A stimulating and complex work....Inimitably provocative in its candor, its freshness, and its foundation on the best of contemporary scholarship."—Church History

From the Publisher