The idea for this anthology arose from
my general dissatisfaction with the way
American religion and American culture are still taught in the schools and
discussed in the secondary literature.
Students of American religion have
been curiously blind to the massive
cultural diffusion of religious creeds,
sentiments, and assumptions, while students of American culture have just as
frequently glossed over, or remained
indifferent to, the crucial theological,
liturgical, and eschatological propulsions of American civilization. There
are numerous reasons for this: longstanding distrust of culture on the part
of students of culture, a legacy of
thought in America about the division
between church and state, and a general
intellectual suspicion about modes of
analysis and interpretation that are necessarily interdisciplinary. Whatever the
causes, the history of American religion
has been oddly insensitive to what was
most theologically problematic for the
majority of our cultural spokesmen, and
the history of American culture has paid
little heed to what was most spiritually
consequential to the majority of our
religious leaders. In both cases, the
decisive element was the symbolic meaning of America itself.