There is a paradox in American Christianity. According to Gallup, nearly eight in ten Americans regard the Bible as either the literal word of God or inspired by God. At the same time, surveys have revealed gaps in these same Americans' biblical literacy. These discrepancies reveal the complex relationship between American Christians and Holy Writ, a subject that is widely acknowledged but rarely investigated. The Bible in American Life is a sustained, collaborative reflection on the ways Americans use the Bible in their personal lives. It also considers how other influences, including religious communities and the Internet, shape individuals' comprehension of scripture. Employing both quantitative methods (the General Social Survey and the National Congregations Study) and qualitative research (historical studies for context), The Bible in American Life provides an unprecedented perspective on the Bible's role outside of worship, in the lived religion of a broad cross-section of Americans both now and in the past. The Bible has been central to Christian practice, and has functioned as a cultural touchstone From the broadest scale imaginable, national survey data about all Americans, down to the smallest details, such as the portrayal of Noah and his ark in children's Bibles, this book offers insight and illumination from scholars across the intellectual spectrum. It will be useful and informative for scholars seeking to understand changes in American Christianity as well as clergy seeking more effective ways to preach and teach about scripture in a changing environment.

This engrossing book traces the social history of Protestant Sunday schools from their origins in the 1790s--when they taught literacy to poor working children--to their consolidation in the 1870s, when they had become the primary source of new church members for the major Protestant denominations. Anne M. Boylan describes not only the schools themselves but also their place within a national network of evangelical institutions, their complementary relationship to local common schools, and their connection with the changing history of youth and women in the nineteenth century. Her book is a signal contribution to our understanding of American religious and social history, education history, women's history, and the history of childhood.

Houses Divided provides new insights into the significance of the nineteenth-century evangelical schisms that arose initially over the moral question of African American bondage. Volkman examines such fractures in the Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches of the slaveholding border state of Missouri. He maintains that congregational and local denominational ruptures before, during, and after the Civil War were central to the crisis of the Union in that state from 1837 to 1876. The schisms were interlinked religious, legal, constitutional, and political developments rife with implications for the transformation of evangelicalism and the United States from the late 1830s to the end of Reconstruction. The evangelical disruptions in Missouri were grounded in divergent moral and political understandings of slavery, abolitionism, secession, and disloyalty. Publicly articulated by factional litigation over church property and a combative evangelical print culture, the schisms were complicated by the race, class, and gender dynamics that marked the contending interests of white middle-class women and men, rural church-goers, and African American congregants. These ruptures forged antagonistic northern and southern evangelical worldviews that increased antebellum sectarian strife and violence, energized the notorious guerilla conflict that gripped Missouri through the Civil War, and fueled post-war vigilantism between opponents and proponents of emancipation. The schisms produced the interrelated religious, legal and constitutional controversies that shaped pro-and anti-slavery evangelical contention before 1861, wartime Radical rule, and the rise and fall of Reconstruction.

Drawing on examples from British world expressions of Christianity, this collection further greater understanding of religion as a critical element of modern children’s and young people’s history. It builds on emerging scholarship that challenges the view that religion had a solely negative impact on nineteenth- and twentieth-century children, or that ‘secularization’ is the only lens to apply to childhood and religion. Putting forth the argument that religion was an abiding influence among British world children throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, this volume places ‘religion’ at the center of analysis and discussion. At the same time, it positions the religious factor within a broader social and cultural framework. The essays focus on the historical contexts in which religion was formative for children in various ‘British’ settings denoted as ‘Anglo’ or ‘colonial’ during the nineteenth and early- to mid-twentieth centuries. These contexts include mission fields, churches, families, Sunday schools, camps, schools and youth movements. Together they are treated as ‘sites’ in which religion contributed to identity formation, albeit in different ways relating to such factors as gender, race, disability and denomination. The contributors develop this subject for childhoods that were experienced largely, but not exclusively, outside the ‘metropole’, in a diversity of geographical settings. By extending the geographic range, even within the British world, it provides a more rounded perspective on children’s global engagement with religion.