Religion in a Revolutionary Age explores the rich variety and enormous complexity of religious experience in early America. Eleven essays address two broad themes: the role of religion in the Revolutionary upheaval itself and the influence of religion on the shaping of America's governing institutions. This broad focus both expands our understanding of the eighteenth century and carries implications for contemporary society. The two opening essays present contrasting assessments of religious experience in the British North American colonies. Jon Butler maintains that coercive authority was the foundation of all religious expression in the colonies, pointing to the importance of church-state relations and the institutional strength, sophistication, and authority of religious denominations. Patricia U. Bonomi contends that most of the colonists were Dissenters and thus at odds with traditional English values, both religiously and politically. The following four essays study the religious experiences of women, blacks, workers, and evangelicals in Revolutionary America. Elaine Forman Crane explores the religious motivations and actions of women and their consequent impact on the political process. Sylvia R. Frey discusses the formative periods of African-American Christianity in the South. Ronald Schultz evaluates the role of religion among Philadelphia's working class in the years after the Revolution. And Robert M. Calhoon studies evangelicalism in the South, particularly its impact on Revolutionary politics, its attempt to reconcile republicanism and Christianity, its congregational discipline, and its sermons. Several contributors then examine the relationship between religion and the political culture of the new nation. Stephen A. Marini analyzes the influence of religion on politics by focusing on the delegates to the state conventions called to ratify the new federal Constitution. Approaching the issue of religion and politics in the Revolutionary era from a different perspective, Edwin S. Gaustad outlines the provisions regulating religion in the state constitutions, the federal Constitution, and the Northwest Ordinance. M. L. Bradbury discusses the creation of structures of governance by three denominations - Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Baptists - in the decades of the Revolutionary era and after. Paul K. Conkin's essay explores implications of the fact that the American Revolution was not paralleled by a religious revolution. In the final essay, Ruth H. Bloch reexamines the debate over Revolutionary ideology that currently rages in American Revolutionary historiography. She looks at the relative influence of community-centered civic humanism and individualistic classical liberalism and their impact on the cultural life of Revolutionary America - particularly the areas of religious and family issues.

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice An ABC Australia Best Book on Religion and Ethics of the Year Distinguished Book Award, Sociology of Religion Section of the American Sociological Association Religion in Human Evolution is a work of extraordinary ambition—a wide-ranging, nuanced probing of our biological past to discover the kinds of lives that human beings have most often imagined were worth living. It offers what is frequently seen as a forbidden theory of the origin of religion that goes deep into evolution, especially but not exclusively cultural evolution. “Of Bellah’s brilliance there can be no doubt. The sheer amount this man knows about religion is otherworldly...Bellah stands in the tradition of such stalwarts of the sociological imagination as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Only one word is appropriate to characterize this book’s subject as well as its substance, and that is ‘magisterial.’” —Alan Wolfe, New York Times Book Review “Religion in Human Evolution is a magnum opus founded on careful research and immersed in the ‘reflective judgment’ of one of our best thinkers and writers.” —Richard L. Wood, Commonweal

A "thought-provoking, meticulously researched" testament to evangelical Christians' crucial contribution to American independence and a timely appeal for the same spiritual vitality today (Washington Times). At the dawn of the Revolutionary War, America was already a nation of diverse faiths-the First Great Awakening and Enlightenment concepts such as deism and atheism had endowed the colonists with varying and often opposed religious beliefs. Despite their differences, however, Americans found common ground against British tyranny and formed an alliance that would power the American Revolution. In God of Liberty, historian Thomas S. Kidd offers the first comprehensive account of religion's role during this transformative period and how it gave form to our nation and sustained it through its tumultuous birth -- and how it can be a force within our country during times of transition today.

The era of the American Revolution was one of violent and unpredictable social, economic, and political change, and the dislocations of the period were most severely felt in the South. Sylvia Frey contends that the military struggle there involved a triangle--two sets of white belligerents and approximately 400,000 slaves. She reveals the dialectical relationships between slave resistance and Britain's Southern Strategy and between slave resistance and the white independence movement among Southerners, and shows how how these relationships transformed religion, law, and the economy during the postwar years.

For most of the eighteenth century, British protestantism was driven neither by the primacy of denominations nor by fundamental discord between them. Instead, it thrived as part of a complex transatlantic system that bound religious institutions to imperial politics. As Katherine Carte argues, British imperial protestantism proved remarkably effective in advancing both the interests of empire and the cause of religion until the war for American independence disrupted it. That Revolution forced a reassessment of the role of religion in public life on both sides of the Atlantic. Religious communities struggled to reorganize within and across new national borders. Religious leaders recalibrated their relationships to government. If these shifts were more pronounced in the United States than in Britain, the loss of a shared system nonetheless mattered to both nations. Sweeping and explicitly transatlantic, Religion and the American Revolution demonstrates that if religion helped set the terms through which Anglo-Americans encountered the imperial crisis and the violence of war, it likewise set the terms through which both nations could imagine the possibilities of a new world.