A groundbreaking new history of the United States, showing how Christian faith and the pursuit of petroleum fueled America's rise to global power and shaped today's political clashesAnointed with Oil places religion and oil at the center of American history. As prize-winning historian Darren Dochuk reveals, from the earliest discovery of oil in America during the Civil War, citizens saw oil as the nation's special blessing and its peculiar burden, the sour...

A prize-winning, five-decade history of the evangelical movement in Southern California that explains a sweeping realignment of American politics.From Bible Belt to Sun Belt tells the dramatic and largely unknown story of “plain-folk” religious migrants: hardworking men and women from Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas who fled the Depression and came to California for military jobs during World War II. Investigating this fiercely pious community at a grassroot...

Los Angeles is a global crossroads of migrating communities that presents a case study of migration, transnationalism, and interfaith engagement with significant implications for thinking and practice in other global hubs. This book weaves together contributions from internationally-recognized scholars who were brought together for the 2020 Missiology Lectures at Fuller Theological Seminary. They examine historical waves of migration — European Protestant, Asian, Latino/a, and Muslim — int...

The Statue of Liberty--depicted on a roadside billboard--did not carry her customary torch and tablet. Instead, she shielded her eyes from words that towered beside her, words that highway drivers could not possibly avoid: "We are no longer a Christian nation." Underneath was the name of the man who spoke them, the nation's president, Barack Obama. He had made the original statement--"Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation, at least not just"--four years earlier. Since ...

This comprehensive reference work brings together a diverse cross-section of established and emerging historians to explore the broad and deep history of Bible-believing, born-again Protestantism, and its dynamic impact on American life and society.The first part of this handbook features nine chronological chapters outlining the history and historiography of evangelicalism in the lands that became the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. In the second par...

No living scholar has shaped the study of American religious history more profoundly than George M. Marsden. His work spans U.S. intellectual, cultural, and religious history from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries.This collection of essays uses the career of George M. Marsden and the remarkable breadth of his scholarship to measure current trends in the historical study of American evangelical Protestantism and to encourage fresh scholarly investigation of this fai...

How evangelical businessmen in the 1930s and 1940s joined their religious and business lives.The evangelical embrace of conservatism is a familiar feature of the contemporary political landscape. What’s less well-known, however, is that the connection predates the Reagan revolution, going all the way back to the Depression and World War II. Evangelical businessmen at the time were quite active in opposing the New Deal—on both theological and economic grounds—and in...

This volume reframes the narrative that has too often dominated the field of historical study of religion and politics: the culture wars.Influenced by culture war theories first introduced in the 1990s, much of the recent history of modern American religion and politics is written in a mode that takes for granted the enduring partisan divides that can blind us to the complex and dynamic intersections of faith and politics. The contributors to Religion and Polit...

The Routledge History of the Twentieth-Century United States is a comprehensive introduction to the most important trends and developments in the study of modern United States history. Driven by interdisciplinary scholarship, the thirty-four original chapters underscore the vast range of identities, perspectives and tensions that contributed to the growth and contested meanings of the United States in the twentieth century. The chronological and topical breadth of the collection h...