San Antonio College Library

Religious life in early America is often equated with the fire-and-brimstone Puritanism best embodied by the theology of Cotton Mather. Yet, by the nineteenth century, American theology had shifted dramatically away from the severe European traditions directly descended from the Protestant Reformation, of which Puritanism was in the United States the most influential. In its place arose a singularly American set of beliefs. In America's God, Mark...

In Pulpit and Nation, Spencer McBride highlights the importance of Protestant clergymen in early American political culture, elucidating the actual role of religion in the founding era. Beginning with colonial precedents for clerical involvement in politics and concluding with false rumors of Thomas Jefferson's conversion to Christianity in 1817, this book reveals the ways in which the clergy's political activism--and early Americans' general use...

"Were America's Founders Christians or deists? Conservatives and secularists have taken each position respectively, mustering evidence to insist just how tall the wall separating church and state should be. Now the author puts their arguments to rest in the first comprehensive analysis of the Founders' beliefs as they themselves expressed them, showing that today's political right and left are both wrong. Going beyond church attendance or public pronouncements...

"Catherine Brekus tells the story of several generations of women - both white and African American - who struggled to forge an enduring tradition of female religious leadership in colonial and antebellum America. Piecing together evidence from a wide range of sources, including religious magazines and newspapers, clergymen's autobiographies, church records, and female preachers' own memoirs and letters, she examines the lives of more than a hundred...

"In The Uneasy Center, distinguished intellectual historian Paul Conkin offers the first comprehensive examination of mainline Protestantism in America, from its emergence in the colonial era to its rise to predominance in the early nineteenth century and the beginnings of its gradual decline in the years preceding the Civil War. He clarifies theological traditions and doctrinal arguments and includes substantive discussions of institutional development...

"In Faiths of Our Fathers, acclaimed historian Alf J. Mapp, Jr., cuts through the historical uncertainty to accurately portray the religious beliefs of eleven of America's Founding Fathers, including John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. He discovers men with religious beliefs as diverse as their political opinions. These profiles shed light on not only the lives and times if the revolutionary generation but also the...

"Dershowitz accuses the Religious Right of using words and phrases found in the Declaration of Independence as indications that the founding of the nation--the intentions of our Founding Fathers, that is--was based on Christian precepts. The major step he takes in refuting this idea, which he finds dangerous, is to negate the concept that the Declaration, despite such language as "Creator" and "Divine Providence," is a document of equal legal state...

The religious beliefs of America s founding fathers have been a popular and contentious subject for recent generations of American readers. In The Founders and the Bible, historian Carl J. Richard examines the framers relationship with the Bible to assess the conflicting claims of those who argue that they were Christians founding a Christian nation against those who see them as Deists or modern secularists. Richard argues that it is impossible to...