This month, the United States marks its 250th anniversary.
And as we've already seen, there's a temptation to tell some pretty tidy stories about national origins and shared ideals at such a time as a Semiquincentennial.
Religion usually pops in that narrative, either as a source of moral consensus built around a shared civil religion or as a part of our supposedly celebrated patchwork society. Both assumptions, however, obscure how religion has functioned less as a stable inheritance and more as a contested, creative and often disruptive force in American life.
For the past fifteen years, I have been reading and reviewing books on American religion while trying to make sense of how scholars, journalists, and practitioners narrate the nation's religious past. Since 2014, I have also been teaching courses on U.S. religion, sitting with students as they encounter, often for the first time, the complexity, contradiction and contingency of the nation's religious life.
I was asked to provide a list of five books to help orient those looking to understand the most significant stories in American religious history as the U.S. approaches its 250th anniversary.
These five books will not give you a single story. They will, however, sharpen your sense of what is at stake in telling one.