The idea of covenant was at the heart of early New England society. In this singular book David Weir explores the origins and development of covenant thought in America by analyzing the town and church documents written and signed by seventeenth-century New Englanders. Unmatched in the breadth of its scope, this study takes into account all of the surviving covenants in all of the New England colonies. Weir's comprehensive survey of seventeenth-century covenants leads to a more complex picture of early New England than what emerges from looking at only a few famous civil covenants like the Mayflower Compact. His work shows covenant theology being transformed into a covenantal vision for society but also reveals the stress and strains on church-state relationships that eventually led to more secularized colonial governments in eighteenth-century New England. He concludes that New England colonial society was much more "English" and much less "American" than has often been thought, and that the New England colonies substantially mirrored religious and social change in Old England.

The Collected Works on Religious Liberty comprehensively collects the scholarship, advocacy, and explanatory writings of leading scholar and lawyer Douglas Laycock, illuminating every major religious liberty issue from both theoretical and practical perspectives. / This first volume gives the big picture of religious liberty in the United States. It fits a vast range of disparate disputes into a coherent pattern, from public school prayers to private school vouchers to regulation of churches and believers. Laycock clearly and carefully explains what the law is and argues for what the law should be. He also reviews the history of Western religious liberty from the American founding to Protestant-Catholic conflict in the nineteenth century, using this history to cast light on the meaning of our constitutional guarantees. / Collected Works on Religious Liberty is unique in the depth and range of its coverage. Laycock helpfully includes both scholarly articles and key legal documents, and unlike many legal scholars, explains them clearly and succinctly. All the while, he maintains a centrist perspective, presenting all sides — believers and nonbelievers alike — fairly.

On May 10, 1776, the Second Continental Congress sitting in Philadelphia adopted a Resolution which set in motion a round of constitution making in the colonies, several of which soon declared themselves sovereign states and severed all remaining ties to the British Crown. In forming these written constitutions, the delegates to the state conventions were forced to address the issue of church-state relations. Each colony had unique and differing traditions of church-state relations rooted in the colony’s peoples, their country of origin, and religion. This definitive volume, comprising twenty-one original essays by eminent historians and political scientists, is a comprehensive state-by-state account of disestablishment in the original thirteen states, as well as a look at similar events in the soon-to-be-admitted states of Vermont, Tennessee, and Kentucky. Also considered are disestablishment in Ohio (the first state admitted from the Northwest Territory), Louisiana and Missouri (the first states admitted from the Louisiana Purchase), and Florida (wrestled from Spain under U.S. pressure). The volume makes a unique scholarly contribution by recounting in detail the process of disestablishment in each of the colonies, as well as religion’s constitutional and legal place in the new states of the federal republic.

Almost 200 years ago the Northeast endured a dramatic, devastating series of cold spells, destroying crops, forcing thousand to migrate west, and causing many to wonder if their assumptions about a world governed by a beneficial Providence were valid. The so-called "year without a summer" also exposed weaknesses in political and theological authorities, spurring a trend toward scientific inquiry and greater democracy. An endangered New England agriculture gave impetus to that region's manufacturing sector. The alarming threat to existence in that part of the country (as well as most of Western Europe) thus helped usher in the modern era. This book is written with the parallels between 1816 and our current "climate change" in mind: it introduces informed non-specialists to the myriad of social, psychological, political, demographic, and economic consequences which can be brought about by abrupt change. A major meteorological event profoundly affected our nation’s development in 1816. This book shows how this weather phenomenon acted as an accelerator of trends which were just emerging in the early 19th-century - toward greater democracy and the spread of information; settlement of the Western frontier; use of the scientific method to investigate and understand natural phenomena; questioning of long-held religious beliefs as a result of increased knowledge; and industrialization as the means to expand the scope and wealth of the United States. Like all my books, America’s First Climate Crisis is written in an accessible, engaging style, using anecdotes and thumbnail sketches to evoke the mood and important personalities of the day. While thoroughly researched, the book avoids the pitfall of academic writing by appealing to the curiosity of intelligent readers who may be put off by uninspired or technical language. The book is organized around various consequences of the disastrous harvests of 1816: after outlining the nature and scope of this calamity, I describe how it brought about a massive exodus to the Ohio Valley and shift in political and economic might to that region; how it undermined the once-unquestioned authority of New England’s Federalist establishment; how it gave greater credence to scientific explanations for weather events and disasters; how it compelled New England merchants to abandon their opposition to manufacturing; and how it helped create a modern awareness of humanity’s place in the universe.

The status of women in four New England seaports during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is thoroughly documented in this illuminating work.

Harry Stout's groundbreaking study of preaching in colonial New England changed the field when it first appeared in 1986. Here, twenty-five years later, is a reissue of Stout's book: a reconstruction of the full import of the colonial sermon as a multi-faceted institution that served both religious and political purposes and explained history and society to the New England Puritans for one and a half centuries.

Evidence of mainstream denominational decline virtually throws itself in our faces--growing religious pluralism in North America; the decline over the last half century in the salience, prestige, power, and vitality of Protestant denominational leadership; slippage in mainline membership and corresponding growth, vigor, visibility, and political prowess of conservative, evangelical, and fundamentalist bodies; patterns of congregational independence, including loosening of or removal of denominational identity, particularly in signage, and the related marginal loyalty of members; emergence of megachurches, with resources and the capacity to meet needs heretofore supplied by denominations (training, literature, expertise); growth within mainline denominations of caucuses and their alignment into broad progressive or conservative camps, often with connections to similar camps in other denominations; widespread suspicion of, indeed hostility towards, the centers and symbols of denominational identity--the regional and national headquarters; migration of individuals and families through various religious identities, sometimes out of classic Christianity altogether. Denominationalism looks doomed and is so proclaimed. It may be. However, viewing the sweep of Anglo-American history, this volume suggests how much denominations and denominationalism have changed, how resilient they have proved, how significant these structures of religious belonging have been in providing order and direction to American society, and how such enduring purposes find ever new structural/institutional expression.