Table of Contents

List of Contributors ix

1 The Centrality, Diversity, and Malleability of American Religion 1
Benjamin E. Park

Part I Colonialisms 7

2 Nemasket/Middleborough and Religious Diversity in Colonial New England 9
Richard J. Boles

3 A View from the Philadelphia Barracks: Religion in the Mid‐Atlantic 25
Rachel Wheeler

4 Africana Religions in Early America 44
Jason R. Young

Part II Establishment 57

5 The Loyalist Church of England Clergy and the Politics of Martyrdom in the American Revolution 59
Peter W. Walker

6 Freeborn Garrettson’s Revolution: Religion and the American War for Independence 71
Christopher Cannon Jones

7 The First Wall of Separation between Church and State: Slavery and Disestablishment in Late‐Eighteenth‐Century Virginia 87
Sarah Barringer Gordon

8 Abraham Remembered: An African Captivity Tale in Early America 102
Jon F. Sensbach

9 The White River Witch‐Hunt and Indigenous Peoples’ Negotiations with Missionaries in the Era of the Early Republic 114
Lori J. Daggar

10 The Shakers and the Perfecting Spirit in Early America 128
Jennifer H. Dorsey

Part III Expansion 137

11 David Walker and Black Prophetic Religion 139
Christopher Cameron

12 “Down with the Convent!”: Anti‐Catholicism and Opposition to Nuns in Antebellum America 150
Cassandra L. Yacovazzi

13 Ecclesiology and the Varieties of Romanticism in American Christianity, 1825–1850 165
Brent S. Sirota

14 Being Haudenosaunee: Seeing Indigenous Ontology Under American Settler Colonialism 179
Christian Gonzales

15 Mormons and Territorial Politics in the American Civil War Era 191
Brent M. Rogers

16 Black Christianity after Emancipation 206
Nicole Myers Turner

Part IV Imperialism 223

17 In Search of a “Working Class Religion”: Religion, Economic Reform, and Social Justice 225
Janine Giordano Drake

18 The Businessman’s Gospel: Making Business Christian 239
Nicole C. Kirk

19 The Prohibition Crusade and American Moral Politics 252
Joseph L. Locke

20 Race, Ethnicity, and Gender Among Early Pentecostals 265
Arlene M. Sanchez‐Walsh

21 Religion and US Federal Indian Policy 276
Sarah Dees

22 “For the Good of Mankind”: Atomic Exceptionalism, Religion, and United States Empire in the Postwar Pacific 287
Carleigh Beriont

Part V Modernity 299

23 The Hate That Hate Produced: Representing Black Religion in the Twentieth Century 301
Vaughn A. Booker

24 The Pentagon Exorcism: 1960s Counter‐Culture and the Occult Revival 317
Joseph P. Laycock

25 Native American Christians and the Varieties of Modern Pentecostalism 329
Angela Tarango

26 Sex, Politics, and the Rise of the New Christian Right 341
Emily Suzanne Johnson

27 Immigration and Religion Among Chinese Americans, 1965 to the Present 355
Melissa May Borja

28 Modern Judaism and the Golden Age of Television 371
Jennifer Caplan

Index 383 

About the Author

BENJAMIN E. PARK is Assistant Professor of History, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, Texas, USA. His articles and essays have been published in Church History, Journal of the Early Republic, Journal of American Studies, Washington Post, and Newsweek, amongst others. He is the author of American Nationalisms: Imagining Union in the Age of Revolutions, 1783-1833 and Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier.