American Religion

On July 2, 1822, Denmark Vesey, a formerly enslaved man, was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina. He was convicted of plotting what might have been the largest insurrection against slaveholders in US history. Witnesses claimed that Vesey appealed to numerous biblical texts to promote and justify the revolt.

Scholars and popular authors regularly claim that Christianity, at least orthodox Christianity, has fostered oppression and intolerance. A common narrative is that liberty and equality have been advanced primarily when America's leaders embrace progressive manifestations of religion or reject faith altogether. This book demonstrates that Christianity is responsible for advancing liberty and equality for all citizens.

Racial Justice and the Catholic Church examines the presence of racism in America from its early history through the Civil Rights Movement and the election of Barack Obama. It also explores how Catholic social teaching has been used - and not used - to promote reconciliation and justice.

The belief that Native Americans might belong to the fabled “lost tribes of Israel” - Israelites driven from their homeland around 740 BCE - took hold among Anglo-Americans and Indigenous peoples in the United States during its first half century. In Lost Tribes Found, Matthew W. Dougherty explores what this idea can tell us about religious nationalism in early America.

Like many who will pick up this book, I am a believer in Jesus Christ. I grew up and currently participate in the American Church scene. I have been to churches in shopping plazas, historic towns, major metropolitan areas, suburbs, cultural hubs, bilingual demographics, and much more. While each has its virtues, singing with their own cadence and tempo, it is always the same tune.

The Great Deception of American Christianity Without Christ exposes the condition of the American Church today, which has evolved mostly into a mixture of man-made traditions, false teachings, unscriptural practices, doctrines of demons, hypocrisy, religious superstitions, false prophets, man-made myths, and a money machine. If you have ever wondered if something just doesn't seem right with our American Christianity, then you need to listen to this book.

Is religion disappearing from American life? Less than 50 percent of Americans now hold membership in any religious institution, and even fewer attend worship services. The decline in Christian churches is especially pronounced among the young, cutting across all denominations.

Most people think that money is the key to happiness, but when an ecstatic Nina Lawson wins millions in the Powerball lottery, her world is turned upside down. At first, she and her fiance, Rick, are delighted with the unexpected windfall and immediately begin planning their future. Soon, family members and friends begin coming out of the woodwork to claim a piece of Nina's winnings. But the most unexpected request comes from Todd, Nina's ex-husband.

In World War II, over 12,000 Protestant ministers, Catholic priests, and Jewish rabbis left the safety of home to join the Chaplain Corps, following the armed forces into battle across Europe, Asia, North Africa, and the high seas. These are the personal stories of some of the bravest and most selfless men who served. All of them battled the pain of separation from their own loved ones as they gave some of the best years of their lives to keep the military personnel spiritually awake, morally fit—and prepared to make the journey from this world to the next without fear or despair.

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) was an inner-city pastor, ethics professor, and author of the famous Serenity Prayer. Time magazine's March 8, 1948, cover story called him "the greatest Protestant theologian in America since Jonathan Edwards". Cited as an influence by public figures ranging from Billy Graham to Barack Obama, Niebuhr was described by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. as "the most influential American theologian of the 20th century".

Christianity takes an astonishing variety of forms in America, from churches that cherish traditional modes of worship to evangelical churches and fellowships, Pentecostal churches, social-action churches, megachurches, and apocalyptic churches - congregations ministering to believers of diverse ethnicities, social classes, and sexual orientations. Nor is this diversity a recent phenomenon, despite many Americans' nostalgia for an undeviating “faith of our fathers” in the days of yore.

The dark-eyed woman in the long, black gown was first seen in the 1970s, standing near a fireplace. She was sad and translucent, present and absent at once. Strange things began to happen in the Santa Fe hotel where she was seen. Gas fireplaces turned off and on without anyone touching a switch. Glasses flew off shelves. And in one second-floor suite with a canopy bed and arched windows looking out to the mountains, guests reported alarming events.

In American Gospel (literally meaning the "good news about America"), New York Times best-selling author Jon Meacham sets the record straight on the history of religion in American public life. As Meacham shows, faith, meaning a belief in a higher power, and the sense that we are God's chosen, has always been at the heart of our national experience, from Jamestown to the Constitutional Convention to the Civil Rights Movement to September 11th.

The question of teaching evolution in the public schools is a continuing and frequently heated political issue in America. From Tennessee's Scopes Trial in 1925 to recent battles that have erupted in Louisiana, Kansas, Ohio, and countless other localities, the critics and supporters of evolution have fought nonstop over the role of science and religion in American public life. In American Genesis, Jeffrey P. Moran explores the ways in which the evolution debate has reverberated beyond the confines of state legislatures and courthouses.

Shaku's eminently reasonable worldview and his skillful exposition of a truly universal definition of divinity and its inevitable necessity are both compelling and difficult to refute. In particular, this collection of discourses probes deeply and revealingly into the fundamental questions that occupy the minds of believers and unbelievers alike: why men cultivate religion in the first place and what the secret of its persistent vitality is.

Where did the ideas come from that became the cornerstone of American democracy? Not only the erudite Thomas Jefferson, the wily and elusive Ben Franklin, and the underappreciated Thomas Paine, but also Ethan Allen, the hero of the Green Mountain Boys, and Thomas Young, the forgotten Founder who kicked off the Boston Tea Party. These radicals who founded America set their sights on a revolution of the mind. Derided as "infidels" and "atheists" in their own time, they wanted to liberate us not just from one king but from the tyranny of supernatural religion.

American Zion is the story of the Bundy family, famous for their armed conflicts in the West. With an antagonism that goes back to the very first Mormons who fled the Midwest for the Great Basin, they hold a sense of entitlement that confronts both law and democracy. Today their cowboy confrontations threaten public lands, wild species, and American heritage.

The mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II is not only a tale of injustice; it is a moving story of faith. In this pathbreaking account, Duncan Ryuken Williams reveals how, even as they were stripped of their homes and imprisoned in camps, Japanese American Buddhists launched one of the most inspiring defenses of religious freedom in our nation's history, insisting that they could be both Buddhist and American.

Drawing on his years of reporting, Jenkins examines the reemergence of progressive faith-based activism, detailing its origins and contrasting its goals with those of the religious right. Today’s rapidly expanding interfaith coalition - which includes Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and other faiths - has become a force within the larger “resistance” movement. Jenkins profiles Washington political insiders as well as a new generation of progressive faith leaders at the forefront today.

This book explores how polarized interpretations of America's past influence the present and vice versa. A focus on competing Protestant reactions to President Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan evidences a fundamental divide over how America should remember historical racism, sexism, and exploitation. Additionally, these Protestants disagree over how the past influences present injustice and equality. Rowley proposes that recovering a complex view of the past, confessing the bad and embracing the good, might help Americans have a shared memory that can bridge polarization.