This book's editors assembled its essays to honour the University of Notre Dame historian, Mark A. Noll, at his retirement. Few would doubt that Noll, one of the most prolific and influential historians of American Christianity, deserves the honour. But does the book succeed where most such Festschriften fail? Does it give compelling reasons for readers to pick it up and use it?
I think that it does. The editors adopt a stratagem that Noll once used to cover two millennia of general church history, in his Turning points: decisive moments in the history of Christianity (Grand Rapid, Mi 2001). In this new work, each author selects a salient episode or development in the history of American Evangelicalism to show how that movement – and sometimes the nation – came away deeply changed. The result is a coherent treatment of formative moments in American religious history.
Harry Stout argues that the Awakening in Colonial North America was indeed Great, even revolutionary. George Whitefield's use of sensory rhetoric and theatrical communications, coupled with Jonathan Edwards's turning the Enlightenment's emphasis on experimental knowledge to religious purposes, empowered ordinary people to experience God's saving purposes and expect great things, of themselves and of their land.
Catherine A. Brekus illustrates this Enlightened Evangelical dynamic in the life and ministry of Sarah Osborn, a schoolteacher from Newport, Rhode Island, whose remarkable memoir shows how her own experimental faith answered her questions about life's purpose, gave her hope of heaven, and empowered her to be God's agent.
Jon Butler, Stout's long-time comrade at Yale University, whose doubts about the existence of a Great Awakening prompted Stout's chapter, writes about a turning-point that has kept on turning back on itself: the disestablishment of religion in the American constitution. Its built-in tension, forbidding both the establishment of a religion and the denial of religious free exercise, has made for perennial debate, as Butler amply illustrates.
Perhaps the greatest turning-point of all was the American Civil War, which merits two chapters. Richard Carwardine shows how the revival-fired reform impulse among Northern Evangelicals contributed to a political crisis and to the war itself when the reformers turned to the issue of slavery. Luke Harlow puts a different twist on the era, arguing that the war first opened up a liberal-conservative theological rift between Evangelicals, because no strictly literal reading of the Bible could condemn slavery outright. The price of conservative Evangelical unity postwar, Harlow insists, was an exit from the reform movement, especially on matters of race.
At the same time that Evangelicals were inspired by revivals to seek perfection in society, argues Marguerite Van Die, they were making the home the mainstay of redemption. It was where the Christianisation of daily life had to begin, and middle-class Evangelicals formed ideal concepts of Christian manhood, womanhood and child-rearing from which they hoped social Christianisation would flow.
Evangelicalism, however, could never be fully domesticated into offering gentle and orderly progress. It has been, says Andrew Walls (The missionary movement, 81), ‘a religion of protest against a Christian society that is not Christian enough’. Two critical turning-points came via nearly simultaneous protest movements, fundamentalism and Pentecostalism. Secularity was coming so swiftly to American culture by the early twentieth century, argues George Marsden, that the rise of fundamentalism, a militantly traditionalist form of Evangelicalism, seemed to be positively infectious. It was urged on by two factors: a volatile new doctrine, dispensationalist premillennialism, with visions of world crisis and imminent Apocalypse; and the era's great Apocalyptic event, the First World War.
Pentecostals were also children of the Second Coming, says Edith Blumhofer, in her study of the movement's convergence in Chicago. Yet they saw it as a time for the world's final great outpouring of the Holy Spirit. While fundamentalism arose close to the centres of Protestant action, Pentecostalism worked the margins, among the more radical seekers of piety and power and among the spiritual strivers of immigrant and African American neighborhoods.
Dennis Dickerson shows that a profound turning-point in American social history, the ‘Great Migration’ of hundreds of thousands of African Americans to the urban North between 1916 and 1930, had deeply religious dimensions too. As black religion encountered an urban environment, it developed new institutions, new styles of music and preaching, new outlets for activism and, perhaps most powerfully, women preachers.
The Australian historian Mark Hutchinson uses the global growth of World Vision, the American Evangelical relief and development agency, to examine the dramatic ‘global turn’ of American Evangelicalism in recent years. It has been not so much about discovering that there are Evangelicals elsewhere in the world or that Americans have a global role to play, but that who Evangelicals are and what they are called to do is now forever shifting and is shaped by many forces, people and places.
Grant Wacker examines the turning-point of Billy Graham's evangelistic career: Los Angeles, 1949. Before it, Wacker insists, Graham was one of a cadre of promising young evangelists from the ‘Youth for Christ’ rallies of the war years. After it, Graham emerged as a preacher to the nation, performing one amazing urban campaign after another, culminating in the 1957 New York City crusade. The Los Angeles campaign was something of a media-sparked lightning strike into the rich soup of Hollywood popular culture, heated by fears of atomic annihilation and carried by the mobilisation of local Evangelicals
Darren Dochuk revisits the global turn among American Evangelicals, focusing on the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization, held in Lausanne. Others have pointed to Lausanne ’74 as a watershed, but Dochuk emphasises that Lausanne ’74's main thrust came from Latin American Evangelical leaders, notably a Peruvian, Samuel Escobar, and an Ecuadorean, Rene Padilla. They powerfully influenced an emerging internationalism among American Evangelicals with a focus on human rights, economic development and social justice.
In an afterward, Martin Marty notes that not the least of the turning points in American Evangelicalism was the historiographical revolution that Noll aided and abetted, beginning with his co-founding of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals (ISAE) at Wheaton College in 1982. Encouraged by the ISAE's efforts, scholars engaged along its networks went on to relocate Evangelicalism near the centre of American history.
Indeed, this book demonstrates the power of that turning-point. Jon Butler, Edith Blumhofer and Darren Dochuk draw fresh discoveries from new topics, while Stout, Carwardine and Dickerson ably summarise their larger works and address new lines of interpretation. Even George Marsden, the senior statesman of the group, engages with a theme that he developed nearly forty years ago with fresh nuance and with a recognition of insights drawn from more recent studies. Outstanding interpretive scholarship abounds in this collection.
In sum, this is not your typical Festschrift. It coheres as a text and has the potential to work at a variety of teaching levels.
