the historyof american christian practice project
Funded by the Lilly Endowment.

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rationale

"Our project is intended to raise large and pressing historical questions and to venture realistic answers."

American Christian practices have changed dramatically between the eighteenth century and the present.  Yet, even as many people seek ways to reinvigorate and revitalize devotional life at the turn of the new century, they know little about historical precedents for what they see around them. How new, in fact, is this kind of practical "seeking"?  How novel is the quest for "authentic" spiritual experience?  Did Christians in the past really practice their faith in more coherent and disciplined ways?  What can a closer examination of devotional practices in the past—including prayer, contemplative practices, rituals of death and dying, and hymnody, among others—reveal to us about our current religious situation?

   Asher Durand, Sunday Morning, 1860

There is little doubt that many of the forces typically associated with "modernity"—a market economy, individual autonomy, technological transformation, consumer abundance, a communications revolution, disestablishment, and ever-increasing pluralism—have affected the shape of the Christian life.  Signs of pronounced changes in devotionalism are everywhere, from the angel phenomenon and the burgeoning of online internet prayer circles, to the increasing popularity of formal liturgies, chants, and contemplative practices.  While many observers say that we are experiencing a devotional renaissance, others claim that these recent developments bespeak a regrettable innovation rather than renovation: the triumph of the therapeutic, consumerist, and individualistic ethos of the age.
 
 

Recent creative scholarship has begun to discern the connections between older Christian practices and new trends.  In Practicing our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People, Dorothy Bass and others took on the challenge of exploring spiritual formation in daily life.  Recognizing that many American Christians have difficulty incorporating religious practice into the demands of their modern schedules and routines, Bass and her colleagues suggested ways in which believers can integrate time-honored traditions such as hospitality, simplicity, healing, and forgiveness into everyday life.  Their work, together with Craig Dykstra's Growing in the Life of Faith, indicates the richness of the topic, and the pressing need for historical scholarship that can begin to establish more precisely the relationship between current practice and the recent Christian past.  The History of American Christian Practice Project seeks to fill this evident gap in our knowledge, to promote public conversations about the connections between our devotional present and our American past.  In this way, we envision it as a historically-grounded counterpart to work begun by Dorothy Bass and others.

It should also be noted that there are already several substantial studies of early modern Protestant practices (for example, those of David Hall and Charles Hambrick-Stowe on Puritan devotionalism).   It is our project’s contention that inadequate research has been done on Christian practice in the modern period (for our purposes, the period stretching from the Enlightenment through the World Wars).  As a result, much of the narrative that does exist reads as a relatively simple story of declension from Reformation practices of piety to modern secular habits in which Christian routines are sadly commercialized, privatized, and rationalized.

 

William Blake, The Web of Religion, 1794
Our project challenges the traditional paradigm of decline.  Stories of improvised adaptation and continuity within change especially interest us.  At what points and for what reasons did Christians adopt new modes of devotion?  What, for example, explains the attractiveness of market freedoms or the allure of mysticism? How were older patterns of piety reformulated in modern guise?  What challenges were posed to received practices of mission and evangelization as Americans encountered peoples of non-Christian, non-European background?  What new forms of community, devotion, and practice emerged?  Unless we move toward answering such questions, we have an incomplete picture of our current situation.  This project seeks to uncover the deeply embedded mental constructs and practical habits of the modern epoch that still very much shadow contemporary Christian lives. In expressly pursuing the ways in which the Christian past illumines the Christian present, our venture takes a different tack than David Hall’s project on “lived religion,” even as it builds on that historical approach to practices.

We are convinced that this historical undertaking will yield insights into our current situation. Understanding the continuing appeal of various modern mores will help us to represent past Christian practices without lapsing into an uncritical nostalgia for lost pieties.  It will also enable us to keep clearly in mind the challenges that everyday Americans currently face in their devotional lives.  Our project is intended to raise large and pressing historical questions and to venture realistic answers:  How have American Christians honored and disciplined the body in the past, and what do those regimens tell us about current bodily practices?  How has religious pluralism reshaped Christian patterns of encounter, witness, and testimony?  How have the instruments of modern technology and the urban bustle of the commercial culture affected the inner terrain of Christian solitude and contemplation?  In sum, what do the ways that Christians have altered their practices in the past tell us about the prospects for change in the present?

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