American Religious History
Patrick N. Allitt, Ph.D. Professor, Emory University
Course No. 897
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American Religious History
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Patrick N. Allitt, Ph.D.
Patrick N. Allitt, Ph.D.
Nostalgia is the enemy of history. 'Downton Abbey' is great fun but it's not history. If seeing or reading something historical makes you feel warm and cosy, it's probably very inaccurate.
InstitutionEmory University
Alma materUniversity of California, Berkeley
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Course Overview
Join historian Patrick N. Allitt in exploring the story of religious life in America from the first European contacts to the late 20th century. Along the way, you learn the answers to two important questions:
Why does America, unlike virtually any other industrial nation, continue to show so much religious vitality?
Why are the varieties of religion found here so numerous and diverse?
The best way to look for explanations of this truly remarkable vitality and diversity, argues Professor Allitt, is to study the nation's religious history.
On the one hand, that study includes examining religion from the directions you might expect, including its formal beliefs, ideas, communal or institutional loyalties, and its styles of worship.
But Professor Allitt also examines religion's influence on life "beyond the pews"—investigating the subtle but important links that have long brought religion into close contact with the intellectual, social, economic, and political concerns of Americans.
To give a notable and recent example: Professor Allitt explains how Martin Luther King, Jr., used a mixture of biblical references and appeals to patriotism to press the case for civil rights.
He also reflects on American religion as a sensory experience—a phenomenon whose deep spiritual and social meanings can in part be:
Seen in the design of churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples
Heard in the sacred sounds of hymns, prayers, and chants
Smelled in Catholic or Buddhist incense
Tasted, as you discover in learning why the casserole may be the most "Protestant" of all dishes!
The Living Voice
A wonderful feature of these lectures is Professor Allitt's practice of reading aloud from primary sources, including first-person documents, as if to give history back its voice. Some readings are quite famous; others are rescued from obscurity.
You will find them by turns sublime, deeply moving, informative, and at times even charming. They include:
Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address
Martin Luther King's 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech
A Civil War veteran's memory of how Catholic sisters cared for the wounded after the Battle of Shiloh
The heartfelt letter to Virginia's governor in which John Rolfe explains his spiritual motives for wishing to marry Pocahontas
An account of the religious diversity of New York City—in 1683
An Anglican cleric's impressions of revivalism in the Carolinas during the First Great Awakening of the 1740s.
Richly Detailed Personal Glimpses
You'll also enjoy biographical sketches and anecdotes about dozens of brilliant, charismatic, or otherwise remarkable American religious figures, among them:
Puritan divine Cotton Mather
Mormon prophet Joseph Smith
Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy
The patriotic revivalist Billy Sunday, who during World War I said, "If you turn hell over, you'll find 'Made in Germany' stamped on the bottom!"
After scene-setting lectures that explain the religious situation of Europe in the early modern period and the spirituality of native Americans, Professor Allitt moves on to discussions of religion during the colonial and founding eras, including:
The Puritans
The Great Awakenings
The Revolution
The flowering of uniquely American religious tendencies such as Mormonism
The story of African American religion
The sectional crisis and Civil War.
Religion in a Changing Society
By the mid-19th century, the American religious landscape was growing more variegated. Large numbers of Catholics, first from Ireland and later from Germany, Poland, and Italy, were coming to what had been an overwhelmingly Protestant land. And growing numbers of Jewish immigrants further diversified the urban religious landscape later in the century.
You learn how both groups sometimes became targets of suspicion and intolerance.
Professor Allitt also discusses another rising reality of the times—the rapid growth of industrial cities and an economically vulnerable working class.
Challenges for Religious Leaders
Faced with these new conditions, religious leaders had to rethink the relationships among virtue, prosperity, and God's favor.
And still another challenge came from 19th-century discoveries in geology, biology, physics, archaeology, and comparative religion.
All of these raised questions about the authority and origins of the Bible. Evolution in particular presented a world of constant predation and strife, promising anything but divinely sponsored harmony.
The 20th century inherited these dilemmas, and they continue to resonate up to the present, with strains between liberal and more traditional Protestants being only one example.
Professor Allitt leads you through these storylines very closely during the second half of the course, paying special attention to the possible implications they carry for church-state relations.
You learn how cherished First Amendment principles of church-state separation and religious freedom had to be applied, mid-century, to difficult cases involving minority religions.
And Professor Allitt explains how, in a string of controversial decisions, the Supreme Court has struggled to balance these two principles.
20th-Century Challenges
As America became a great power in the 20th century and played a leading role in the world wars and the Cold War, religious Americans agonized over how they should respond.
You learn how debates over the ethics of force and memories of cataclysms such as the Holocaust continue to haunt American religious life to this day.
And you see how the century's sweeping social changes were partly shaped by religion and how they in turn powerfully affected religious life:
Fundamentalism proved highly adaptable
Immigrants and their descendants assimilated to American society, but religious ties proved far more durable than old languages and ethnic customs
Catholicism and Judaism each took on a markedly "American" flavor that could discomfit coreligionists abroad.
At the Center of the Storm
You also learn how religion stood at the center of the upheavals of the 1960s. Many African American civil rights leaders were ministers, inspired by the message of the gospel as well as the promise of the American founding. Religious convictions likewise intensified debates over the Vietnam War and helped energize the feminist movement.
As the times have changed, so, too, has religion in America. Some Americans who felt dissatisfied with the Judeo-Christian tradition turned to variants of Islam or Asian spiritualities such as Zen Buddhism. And new waves of immigrants brought their own versions of these traditions, sometimes bumping up against unfamiliar American versions of Buddhism, Islam, and Hinduism.
As this course shows, the story of American religious vitality and diversity continues to evolve.
24 Lectures
Average 31 minutes each
1
Major Features of American Religious History
2
The European Background
3
Natives and Newcomers
4
The Puritans
5
Colonial Religious Diversity
6
The Great Awakening
7
Religion and Revolution
8
The Second Great Awakening
9
Oneida and the Mormons
10
Catholicism
11
African-American Religion
12
The Civil War
13
Victorian Developments
14
Darwin and Other Dilemmas
15
Judaism in the 19th Century
16
Fundamentalism
17
War and Peace
18
Twentieth-Century Catholicism
19
The Affluent Society
20
The Civil Rights Movements
21
The Counterculture and Feminism
22
Asian Religions
23
Church and State
24
The Enduring Religious Sensibility
What's Included?
Instant Audio
A$149.95
Download 24 audio lectures to your computer or mobile app
Downloadable PDF of the course guidebook
FREE audio streaming of the course from our website and mobile apps
Reviews
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☆☆☆☆☆4.5 out of 5 stars. Read reviews for American Religious History 4.5 105 ReviewsThis action will navigate to reviews.
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☆☆☆☆☆ 4.5Overall, average rating value is 4.5 of 5.
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☆☆☆☆☆5 out of 5 stars.NYNM · 14 years ago
Review by NYNM. Written 14 years ago. 5 out of 5 stars.One of the best
Allitt (interestingly not American) offers, in my opinion, one of the best lectures series available… Show Full ReviewThis action will open a modal dialog.
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☆☆☆☆☆3 out of 5 stars.Marvmax1 · 8 years ago
Review by Marvmax1. Written 8 years ago. 3 out of 5 stars.Parts Were Good Parts Were Abominable
I was very pleased with this series as I began listening to it. Despite what Peirs Morgan says Ameri… Show Full ReviewThis action will open a modal dialog.
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☆☆☆☆☆4 out of 5 stars. EngineerinVA · 7 months ago
Good Survey
This is a good survey of religions and influence of religions in America. It does not provide much depth (as indeed survey courses are not designed to provide depth) but it does provide sufficient breadth of the religious scene. It addresses evangelicals and liberal Protestants. It discusses Roman Catholics, Jews, Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), and (to a lesser degree) Muslims. It discusses African-American influence and Asian influence. It discusses topics such as Civil Rights, feminism, ecology, war and peace, and political influence. And I think it does so even-handedly.
The course was published in 2001 so there are decades of recent religious issues that are not addressed. Even so, this course is valuable as a foundational survey of religion in America.
Dr. Allitt is British looking at religion in America so he has the perspective of a political (if not theological) outsider. His lectures are accessible.
I used the audio version. I think that I did not miss much if anything by not having the visual aids. Thus, this course can be used while exercising or commuting.
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Prior Subject Knowledge Intermediate
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☆☆☆☆☆4 out of 5 stars. MuskoGuy · a year ago
Good overview.
This is a very good overview of American religious history. With so many years to cover, Dr. Allitt cannot spend much time on any one religious movement so there is not much depth in his lectures but this is a good place to start in trying to understand the influence of religion on American life and how America has exerted its influence on religion. His use of lengthy quotes gives us an insider's view of the different religions.
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☆☆☆☆☆5 out of 5 stars. Oldstudent01 · a year ago
American Religious History
This is my first audio only class, and I really enjoyed it. I found the lectures to be well done, accurate in accord with my prior knowledge, easy to follow, and certainly enlightening in connecting so much in the world.
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☆☆☆☆☆
☆☆☆☆☆5 out of 5 stars. Tabiah · a year ago
Very Interesting
The professor's knowledge and presentation makes the subject very interesting and in depth. I do wish there was an updated and video version. Highly recommended!
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Prior Subject Knowledge Novice
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☆☆☆☆☆
☆☆☆☆☆5 out of 5 stars. Old Grad · a year ago
Great topic that is too often overlooked
This is an excellent survey of the theme of religion in the history of what evolved from the colonies to the United States. This is a thread that is often overlooked in many history courses, and Prof Allitt does an outstanding job of relating the importance and influence of religion in American history. The stories are vivid, and he links them very effectively with the overall theme of religion in our society. The contrast he draws between the religious molding of the individual vs. religion as a catalyst for social change is very important.
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☆☆☆☆☆5 out of 5 stars. Reza K · a year ago
Very good course
Very informative & interesting presentation. Easy to understand & follow in the gym.
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☆☆☆☆☆2 out of 5 stars. lifeofbrian · 3 years ago
Questioning tone and accuracy
This is a hard one, because Professor Allitt is a very engaging speaker, a good storyteller, and packs his courses with interesting information. However, there are two things that really detracted from this course--the tone and the accuracy of the information.
First, the tone of this course. The stories and anecdotes often featured the most outlandish figures and extreme anecdotes of various faiths and movements. For instance, during the prohibition movement, we get a story of a woman who goes around with an axe and smashes up saloons. While quite amusing, does this story really give us a good sense of what most of the prohibition movement was like? In the lecture on Native American religion, I couldn't help but notice all the anecdotes were from Europeans, which were often biased. Having read up some on Native American religion, I felt like this lecture missed the core underpinnings and spirit of Native American religion and culture. What I was hoping for from this course was that we would come to understand and appreciate what drew people into like-minded communities in America. But this course was so focused on the amusing, the absurd, and the outlandish that I really don't feel like I came away with a better appreciation of the beliefs of communities different from my own. There was just a little too much poking fun for my taste.
Second, there are some surprising inaccuracies in this course. I recommend that you read the long critique from a Mormon reviewer in this review section about certain inaccuracies. Additionally, I would like to note a needed correction to the section on Christian Science, a religion started in the Victorian Era. Professor Allitt proposes that the religion's founder, Mary Baker Eddy, went to a mesmerist/hypnotist named Quimby, received a healing from an illness, and then decided to combine hypnotism with Christianity. The true story is this: having not received healing from traditional medicine, Eddy tried several alternative forms of Victorian treatment, including homeopathy and Quimby. While she received some initial relief from Quimby, she was never healed, and ultimately his treatments proved ineffective. Later, she received a healing while reading her Bible and decided she wanted to dedicate her life to learn how to heal like Jesus, the disciples, and early Christians had. Professor Allitt mentions the popular "What Would Jesus Do?" slogan that appeared during the Victorian Era. Well, think of Eddy as starting the "How Would Jesus Heal?" religious movement. Since Jesus didn't use homeopathy, hygiene, hypnotism, medicine, spiritualism, etc. those were all out. As a matter of fact, she would later come to say that hypnotism/mesmerism was the opposite of Christian Science because the hypnotist was focused on the human will, whereas she believed all healing came from the divine.
I puzzled a little bit about how an Oxford scholar could have brought such incorrect information into the course, when I remembered that there were Victorian journalists that wrote many critical articles about Mrs. Eddy, including that all her ideas came from Quimby. This was because the patriarchal society was much more comfortable with attributing a new religion to a man than admit the possibility that a woman had unique ideas of her own and was forming a fast-growing and popular religious movement. Professor Allitt must have read something attributed to these early patriarchal newspapers, because most non-denominational scholars correctly classify Eddy as a theologian, philosopher, and religious leader in her own right. Overall, I rate the section on Christian Science as perhaps 25% historically accurate.
There were also several other times in the course that I felt like I was either not getting a complete picture or possibly inaccurate information, but am not enough of a scholar in those areas to give a definite critique. It's with remorse that I'm leaving a low review for this course, as the topic is a very interesting one and Professor Allitt is very engaging. But once you begin to question accuracy, you start to question everything you're learning.
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AustinTexan · 2 years ago
Sounds like you would like a more "reverent" treatment of this broad brush history of American religious history, and are put off with Prof. Allitt's engaging storytelling, though you do acknowledge that. He brings this style to other subjects as well - I recently finished an unrelated series of his.
The image of Carrie Nation smashing a barrel of spirits with an axe is virtually an icon of the temperance movement, and Nation even posed holding for a photo holding an axe, so it hardly seems to be cherry-picking to mention it!
You allude to the criticisms of the Mormon reviewer (see one-star review) but despite claiming to be a student of Mormon history, he was not aware of a well-known bit of early LDS history, which I referenced in a comment.
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☆☆☆☆☆1 out of 5 stars. Gharmjo · 3 years ago
COLLAPSES INTO SENSATIONALISM
As others have mentioned, the course starts off fairly well but falls apart in its latter half. AS AN EXAMPLE, consider L22 "Asian Religions": Mixed in with a very brief discussion of the arrival of eastern Orthodox Christianity, we have The Beat Generation. For those who don't remember: its Jack Kerouac was diagnosed with dementia praecox (schizophrenia) long before he got his Zen on. Novelty-starved college professors (who opposed religion on campus) elevated Jack and the very creepy Allen Ginsberg ("suicide, sex, & drugs") to a religion substitute. Unfortunately, those same professors graded us so we had to friendly-bobble our heads, though only those on drugs saw any religious meaning in mad Jack. Then Allitt relates that the Beatles (of England) visited the Yogi (of India) whose primarily NON-RELIGIOUS worldwide TM movement adherents were "tens of thousands". In America (the subject of this course) they found a market on “religion-free“ campuses & sold mail-order health supplements. (So why is this in a religion course?). Next we have Jacob Needleman, dissatisfied with Judeo-Christian tradition...yet his "famous" quotes plagiarize Judeo-Christian thought via paraphrase: "We are born for meaning not pleasure...", "The root of materialism is a poverty of ideas about the inner and outer world", etc. Finally, the chapter ends with a very, very brief discussion of the major religion of Islam (with 1.8 billion adherents worldwide rather than TM's "10's of thousands").
CONS: 1. Too many sideshows turn American Religious History into a freak show. L13's Sylvester Graham used religion as a handle but his over-arching thrust was dietary manipulation. Bruce Barton's "muscular, bronzed Jesus" (L13) is followed by an admission that this was about consumerism (ie: not religion). The False Dilemma logical fallacy evident in Social Darwinism's/Henry Ward Beecher's thesis of "poverty...(as) a reflection of God and evolution at work" (L14) is eviscerated by the Biblical passages of John 12:7 or Mark 14:6. Another sideshow, (L21) portrays Jesus as a proto-hippie? Excuse me? Experiments in feminine witchcraft/goddess worship (L21) might count as quasi-religious were they not so fringe and age-transient. Allitt confuses the main thrust of theological history with an overwhelming number of sensational sidebars.
2. This 2001 course shows its age: (L1) "Today...(p)ublic declarations of atheism...are almost unknown here (the US)." I guess that was before the secular humanist "Freedom From Religion Foundation", etc. Yet in L23, Allitt accurately describes "secular humanism" as a parody religion (a BELIEF system mocking religion). Because of its age, the course is unable to speculate whether the Supreme Court might next outlaw such parody religion in the school system and Public Square. One can only hope.
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cyfloyd · 2 months ago
Does this come as a DVD?
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TracyTGC · 2 months ago
No, it doesn't come as a DVD, only as an Instant Audio. I apologize for any inconvenience.
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teach · a year ago
The other Great Courses I have taken have a video portion with a guidebook. I see that this course is audio only. Is there a guidebook that comes with the audio?
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TracyTGC · a year ago
Yes, the Instant Audio version of the course comes with a PDF file of the Guidebook, not a physical copy. The Guidebook will be in your Digital Library with the course.
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Reader11 · 6 years ago
Should I buy audio or video?
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MarySweetTooth · 6 years ago
I have the DVD because I tend to remember things I see better than just hear; however, I do also mostly listen to this course as I am working on a cross stitch project so this course is just as easy to have as a CD. As far as the DVD, you see the professor at the podium or walking a little away from it, a couple maps of Italy showing where the various cities are in relation to each other, and a couple pictures of the individuals he is talking about. So if you really wanted to see those individuals, you can google them.
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Shmuel · 7 years ago
Why does the cover to this course reads 'Professor Phillip Cary' when it is produced by Professor Patrick N. Allitt?
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TGCSoxGuy · 7 years ago
This appears to be a (rather significant) typographical error on this image of the course guidebook's cover. The professor of the course is definitely Patrick Allitt, though Phillip Cary also has a number of theology courses with us.
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READVA · 9 years ago
Does the American Religious History course have a transcript for sale?
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thelje · 8 years ago
The CD comes with a guidebook that gives an outline of each lecture, suggested additional readings and a couple of discussion questions and at the end, has a bibliography. Found the guidebook helpful.
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JimA · 9 years ago
What is a guide book?
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thelje · 8 years ago
The guidebook gives outlines of the lectures and has discussion questions at the end of each lecture. If you are taking the course in a group setting (am taking one course that way), it gives a starting point. There are suggested readings after each lecture and a bibliography at the end. I find the guidebooks helpful since I am not a good aural learner, rather I need written/visual cues to truly learn.
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