A few suggestions for book clubs on American religious history and related topics:

Return to Home

John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story From Early America. Vintage Books, 1994. 252pp. Demos has written some of the most important scholarly books about Puritan families; this one tells the story of the famous 1704 raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts, through the fate of Eunice Williams, the daughter of a prominent Congregational pastor. Abducted along with her father and four of her siblings, and forced to march north to Canada, Eunice was the only family member not returned to New England. She stayed on—by choice—with her captors, converting to Catholicism and marrying a Mohawk husband. Demos interweaves the historical record with his own imaginative retelling of the family drama, set against the clash of French, English, and Native American cultures.

Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity ( Oxford University Press, new edition, 2003)  In 1980, the average Christian was no longer white, European or American. Jenkins’ provocative overview of Christianity’s recent demographic shift toward a majority “third world” constituency should raise many questions for western Christians about the ways their faith community is changing. The new face of Christianity in Africa, South America and Asia, Jenkins argues, is an intriguing mix of ethical conservatism and a vigorous apocalyptic vision of the future.

Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilenz, The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19 th-Century America. Oxford University Press, 1994. In 1834, the New York press was buzzing with reports of misdoings—financial and sexual—in the religious cult run by the self-styled Prophet Matthias, also known as Robert Matthews. This fast-paced account reads like a novel, but also offers a re markable glimpse of the weird and wonderful margins of nineteenth-century American religious life, in terms that resonate with recent events in Jonestown and Waco.

George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life. Yale University Press, 2003. 505pp. Marsden’s biography of America’s greatest theologian is a nuanced and sensitive portrayal of a complex man, and offers a fascinating introduction to the religious worlds of the eighteenth century. Readers interested in Congregational history, folkways, and theological issues will find this lengthy but richly informative book a rewarding project.  

 James Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History. Yale University Press, 2003. 497. pp   A colorful narrative that lays out the passionate, puzzling, and complex relationship of religion and politics in American history, demonstrating that all of the recent talk about morality and government has a long and thoroughly interesting past. The book is long, but accessible to a variety of readers. Morone is a political scientist who has purposefully set out to avoid the usual academic jargon of his profession; he writes in clear, simple prose, interlaced with good stories about past events that are sometimes humorous, sometimes horrifying.

Shirley Nelson, Fair, Clear and Terrible: The Story of Shiloh, Maine. 447 pp. A harrowing, true story of a religious community gone awry.  At the turn of the century, Nelson’s entire family fell under the sway of the charismatic holiness preacher Frank Sanford, who led a colony of ardent believers into separation from the world and was eventually convicted of manslaughter. Nelson’s account is one of the best depictions of the manipulative logic of control that a cult gains over its followers.

Adam Nicholson, God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. Harper Collins, 2003. 243 pp. A very human account of the secular politics and spiritual yearnings behind the translation of the English-speaking world’s most enduring translation of the Bible. Nicholson’s prose is reason enough to pick up his book, but the story he tells of men absolutely given to spiritual study and prayer is a compelling, challenging tale for modern readers.

Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s. University of California Press, 1998. 198 pp. Any book by Wuthnow will reward readers who want to get behind the myths about religion in America, but this one is a particularly insightful analysis of the generational differences between believers who came of age in the 1950s and those who followed after. This is not a book about organized religion, but about the many ways that ordinary Americans talk about their faith. Drawing on many interviews and personal accounts, Wuthnow makes a distinction between an older “spirituality of dwelling” and a “spirituality of seeking,” and offers a sensitive discussion of practices that enliven faith for believers living in a secular world.

Please contact Peggy Bendroth for more book options.