Book Review

An era has ended. The political expression that most galvanized evangelicals during the past quarter-century, the Religious Right, is fading. What's ahead is unclear. Millions of faith-based voters still exist, and they continue to care deeply about hot-button issues like abortion and gay marriage, but the shape of their future political engagement remains to be formed. Into this uncertainty, former White House insiders Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner seek to call evangelicals toward a new kind of political engagement -- a kind that is better both for the church and the country, a kind that cannot be co-opted by either political party, a kind that avoids the historic mistakes of both the Religious Left and the Religious Right. Incisive, bold, and marked equally by pragmatism and idealism, Gerson and Wehner's new book has the potential to chart a new political future not just for values voters, but for the nation as a whole.

American cities are in the midst of fundamental changes. De-industrialization of large, aging cities has been enormously disruptive for urban communities, which are being increasingly fragmented. Though often overlooked, religious organizations are important actors, both culturally and politically in the restructuring metropolis. Public Religion and Urban Transformation provides a sweeping view of urban religion in response to these transformations. Drawing on a massive study of over seventy-five congregations in urban neighborhoods, this volume provides the most comprehensive picture available of urban places of worship-from mosques and gurdwaras to churches and synagogues-within one city. Revisiting the primary site of research for the early members of the Chicago School of urban sociology, the volume focuses on Chicago, which provides an exceptionally clear lens on the ways in which religious organizations both reflect and contribute to changes in American pluralism. From the churches of a Mexican American neighborhood and of the Black middle class to communities shared by Jews, Christians, Hindus, and Muslims and the rise of "megachurches," Public Religion and Urban Transformation illuminates the complex interactions among religion, urban structure, and social change at this extraordinary episode in the history of urban America.

Floods of immigration and rapid industrialization and urbanization in America at the turn of the century set in motion the transformation of many long-established institutions. This book examines specific ways in which cultural changes affected the structure of the religious establishment. Statistical models are applied to United States Census data from 1890 and 1906 on city and church populations, revealing connections between the growth of cities, the increase in literacy, and the formation of ethnic subcommunities that led to a new level of religious diversity. The author analyses evidence of growing competition among churches and of a level of individual commitment to congregations, demonstrating that the patterns of religious community established at the turn of the century provided the basis for the current denominational system. The author further analyses the relationship of religious diversity to urban secularization, as well as its role as a catalyst to sectarian conflict. In offering a quantitative assessment of issues central to the history of American religion, this book is a significant contribution to the study of religion in America.

Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans examines a difficult chapter in American religious history: the story of race prejudice in American Christianity. Focusing on the largest city in the late-nineteenth-century South, it explores the relationship between churches--black and white, Protestant and Catholic--and the emergence of the Jim Crow laws, statutes that created a racial caste system in the American South. The book fills a gap in the scholarship on religion and race in the crucial decades between the end of Reconstruction and the eve of the Civil Rights movement. Drawing on a range of local and personal accounts from the post-Reconstruction period, newspapers, and church records, Bennett's analysis challenges the assumption that churches fell into fixed patterns of segregation without a fight. In sacred no less than secular spheres, establishing Jim Crow constituted a long, slow, and complicated journey that extended well into the twentieth century. Churches remained a source of hope and a means of resistance against segregation, rather than a retreat from racial oppression. Especially in the decade after Reconstruction, churches offered the possibility of creating a common identity that privileged religious over racial status, a pattern that black church members hoped would transfer to a national American identity transcending racial differences. Religion thus becomes a lens to reconsider patterns for racial interaction throughout Southern society. By tracing the contours of that hopeful yet ultimately tragic journey, this book reveals the complex and mutually influential relationship between church and society in the American South, placing churches at the center of the nation's racial struggles.