Within the current social context, the historical study (and restudy) of American religious history is indeed a worthy endeavor. No longer a “jack-in-the-box” topic, religion has captured the attention of American historians inside history departments and religious studies faculties alike. Yet writings on American religion by historians continue to draw both acclaim and critique by religious studies scholars, with religious studies scholars often claiming the approaches to religious history employed by historians presuppose the nature of American religion. There is a gradual shift toward social and cultural histories of “lived religion” that incorporate the visual and material, as well as continued intellectual histories of internal or individual beliefs. It is this scuffle that Hayes's and Mullen's work joins.Footnote ¹

Both Hayes's and Mullen's books provide strong examples of American religious history seeking to revive folklore and synthetic history. Notably, Hayes's use of exploration and integration of folklore in his study of the religion of poor and working-class Southerners gives the reader a tangible way to see beyond notions of religion as primarily an individual or internal belief. For Hayes, religion, in the form of “folk Christianity,” was a space in which poor whites and blacks “creatively used an array of cultural material to probe the depths of mortality, or personal transformation, of manifesting the sacred, of living as a neighbor” (196). Mullen, on the other hand, reminds the reader that despite the movement within American religious history to focus on collective and community-based formations of religion, during the nineteenth century, individual choice in the ritual of conversion shaped the social fabric of America as it entered the twentieth century. Both authors seek to return to popular historiographical practices. For Hayes this means challenging the understanding of Southern religion as purely segregated in the era of the New South and for Mullen this is embodied in the form of re-employing a synthetic model.

John Hayes's Hard, Hard Religion provides a multisensory exploration of the religion of the poor South during the era of the “New South.” Looking beyond standard social analyses of the Southeast United States during this era that segregate the study of religion primarily on the lines of “Protestant” (read white) and black religion, Hayes challenges the notion that Jim Crow was the sole determining factor for all of life in the New South. In particular, Hayes employs religion as a space in which poor blacks and whites transgressed social expectations, guidelines, and historic assumptions to articulate a world that does not easily fit within the depiction of the New South era.

Hayes's study provides what he calls a “historical excavation of a hidden layer of religious activity, a vibrant world of grassroots ferment and folk creativity” that complicates previous assumptions of Southern social history and confronts the reader with a religious world different than those often remembered in the New South (4). Instead of race as the determining interpretative framework for social history of the New South, Hayes relies on religion and class to provide a more nuanced picture of daily lives of both blacks and whites during the period. Hayes is keen to qualify that though folk Christians were marginalized as a moral problem by the established religions of the New South, they were numerically regular fixtures of the historic landscape.

One of the greatest strengths of Hayes's book is its sourcing. As one might expect of a historian employing folklore techniques, Hayes captures the reader's attention with song lyrics, grave decorations, popular paintings, and the guiding metaphors of the fiction author Flannery O'Connor. It is by moving beyond just textual narratives that Hayes is able to substantiate a world of religion, “folk Christianity,” where the poverty of the New South era was negotiated by both black and white Southerners through the forging of an ethic he calls “neighborliness” (Hayes, 184). Hayes's work provides a compelling historic testament to the diverse array of material and visual culture that expands the archive for those seeking to write histories of religious communities that do not easily fit into the paradigm of Protestant Christianity. The reader is confronted with folk practices such as decorating graves with pottery, glass bottles, clocks, and other quotidian items. This burial practice with roots in West Africa was shared and proliferated by both poor blacks and whites through folk Christianity, materializing a shared network and enchanted world that the middle class of the New South marginalized as “fetish” and “superstition” (126, 130). Musical ballads such as “Conversation with Death” show a mixed pedigree of European and African folk-inspired melodies that Hayes illustrates are solidified not in communities designated by race but rather situated through class and the shared realities of poverty (71, 85). Hayes's investigation of religion and class adds another layer to the study of Southern religion and raises new questions about race, class, and religion in U.S. history generally.

Mullen's The Chance for Salvation is ambitious in scope and broad in content, seeking to resurrect a synthesis approach to the history of religion in America by focusing on religious practice. Mullen lucidly introduces the reader to the use of synthetic history in American religious histories, situating his project in the constructive debate between Sidney Mead and Sydney Ahlstrom. Ahlstrom's 1972 Religious History of the American People sought to encompass all religious communities by expanding a Protestant Christian narrative of American religious history to include these diverse histories. Ironically instead of precipitating more synthesis histories, Ahlstrom's book produced a tome-like volume that inevitably left out many religious communities. In turn, it inspired a proliferation of histories that explored diverse religious groups outside Ahlstrom's Protestant mainstream and represented a turn in the historiography of American religion away from synthesis.Footnote ² In short, Mead sought to find commonalities of religions and Ahlstrom sought to display the diverse array of groups. Mullen is trying to do justice to both Mead and Ahlstrom: to Mead by looking at a common practice “conversion” and to Ahlstrom by displaying a diverse array of religious and subsequently diverse articulations of conversion. Mullen's book is an attempt to learn from these many histories of diverse American religions and forge a synthesis that gives voice to difference while finding a common narrative, to pull “together many of the extraordinarily disparate pieces of American religious history into a coherent narrative that shows what was common to them all, and thus what made them different” (10).

Mullen traces the centrality of individual religious conversions in the nineteenth century and how its rituals shaped and continues to shape American religious life. Mullen claims that religion in America in the nineteenth century, through conversion, transformed from an inheritance into an obligatory choice that preceded the marketplace narratives of religion seen in twentieth-century historiography. He relies heavily on autobiography and oral sources to provide individual insights into diverse religions, devoting chapters to Evangelical Protestants, Native American Christians, African American Christianity, Mormonism, Judaism, and Roman Catholics. Dealing with such a diversity of religious communities and traditions, Mullen provides the reader with statistical data on conversions within each group alongside rich individual narrative histories of conversion.

Mullen's text is a valuable resource for professors seeking examples of diverse conversion narratives for lectures and reading assignments. One of the greatest strengths of this work is its sheer array of individual narrative microhistories that makes Mullen's text an intriguing read for students, who could even engage sections of the work as a narrative primary source reader. Looking across an entire century, book-ended by the encyclopedic study of diverse religions by Hannah Adams and the psychological study of religion by William James, Mullen's book takes the reader through a whirlwind of religions, narratives, and microhistories. Seeking to amend a previous view of synthesis historiography that sought to render religions as part of (or outside) a central historical narrative (namely Protestantism), Mullen's task is challenging. He asserts that his focus on conversion is not to simplify all religions into the same act but rather to recognize how these diverse religions confronted each other and often joined, left, or distanced themselves through the obligatory choice of conversion in nineteenth-century America.

Reading Mullen, one learns that Evangelical Protestants such as Charles Finney systematized conversion into a recognizable and necessary choice that religious presses such as the American Tract Society disseminated throughout the networks of Protestantism in consumable and mass-distributed form like the formulaic “sinner's prayer” (28–35, 53). It is this same choice that Mullen is able to find for the reader in diverse settings such as the gift economy of the Cherokee, who, dispossessed of their land, receive conversion by creating Cherokee Christianity (99, 102). But conversion, as Mullen explains through biographical narratives of intermarriage of Jews and Christians, could also be a test of sincerity. Jewish communities in the nineteenth century, for instance, required that a conversion be based on halakhah and thus theologically motivated instead of merely an effort to satisfy the parents of someone's beloved. Conversion, from this orientation, presented as potentially opportunists and suspicious (Mullen, 195, 213). Mullen's history presents religion in the nineteenth century as not simply a family affair but a market of choices. Conversion was diverse and inflected with different requirements, but by the mid-nineteenth century, choice was required; one must choose one's religion even if one had been born into it.

The amount of physical research that the author has compiled is staggering. Each chapter provides an in-depth look at religion as choice through the lens of diverse racial, religious, and social movements. Those familiar with the recent digital historical research that Mullen is undertaking will not be surprised by the immense constellation he connects between seemingly dissimilar groups in each of these chapters. His argument for the impact of “choice” and the evolution of the popular perception of religion in the nineteenth century is compelling and will no doubt inspire further applications.

These two books take dynamically different approaches to the task of American religious history. Mullen seeks to characterize an entire century through a synthesis made of coagulated microhistories, and Hayes seeks to harness religion as a cultural space that challenges the preconceived social arrangement of an era. Both authors incorporate a lived practice approach to the religious communities they are studying. For Mullen, this takes form in the ritual of conversion; for Hayes this is embodied in array of “folk” culture in the poor South.

Questions opened up by these books could be further developed. For example, Hayes's “folk Christianity” would be a great framework to think through prominent religions of the poor in the New South, such as Pentecostalism, a religion founded by poor blacks and whites in and from the South during this era. And Mullen's conversation on synthesis history will surely continue, but one cannot but ask how historians can posit conversion, a Protestant belief about an internal assertion, as the ritual that all of nineteenth-century religion is read through without succumbing to the hegemonic tendencies of American religious synthesis history that Mullen seeks to overcome? And what does this tell us about the promise of synthesis history generally in the project of American religious history? Despite these questions, American religious history is much richer for the contribution of these authors.