In a 1999 speech at the Yale Law School, former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed was asked to explain how school vouchers could be constitutional. The questioner argued that voucher programs that allowed government money to be used at religious schools would violate the constitutional separation of church and state. In reply, Reed argued, in part, that the voucher system was really nothing new. He failed to see the difference, he said, between the program he was advocating and an earlier program under which the federal government had paid for hundreds of thousands of individuals to go to religious schools. That program, he said, was the G.I. Bill.

In the Introduction to his lectures on the modern British missionary movement published in 1965, Max Warren suggested that “any serious student of modern history must find some explanation of the missionary expansion of the Christian Church.” Many, perhaps most, scholars have ignored his advice, and until very recently, it would have been difficult to persuade researchers in the modern academic mainstream to take such an injunction seriously, so flatly would it have seemed to contradict or question the dominant assumptions of liberal, secular scholarship. The progress of an all-pervasive secularization meant that missions, if not the churches both that supported them and that they hoped to build, were to be listed amongst history's losers and were therefore unattractive subjects for study.

Like David Hollinger I think that the history of secularization, or as he prefers, de-Christianization, has been unduly avoided and might well be at the center of contemporary American historiography. As he says, this ought to bring religious history more into the mainstream. But I would like to develop some of his points in a different way than he does in the recent “Perspectives” section in Church History. Our differences derive from the fact that he sees secularization as a default value, the absence of a distraction, whereas I focus on secularism, something substantial and ideological. I hope that adopting that perspective may make sense of his main puzzle, which is why religion “persists” in America even though it has lost all the recent debates. Indeed I would like to turn his question around, to suggest that secularism is failing and that we should start thinking in terms of a “post-secular” society. This could mean, contrary to Hollinger's implication, that America is not lagging in this area but might be “ahead” of Europe.

Undoubtedly, there are many centers to American religion—many topoi around which the wide-ranging multitude of historical developments associated with American religion might be seen to coalesce. Among the several that spring to mind—commitment to family, gender negotiation, concern for religious experience, freedom, conscience, millennial eschatology, respect for the Bible, social reform, desire for salvation (and there must be numerous others beyond my ken)—I see the myth of the Puritans as a good candidate for premier topos. In recommending it as a central category for organizing multiple forms and dimensions of American religion, I do not mean to draw attention to the Puritans in the exactitude of their historical existence, but rather to the myth of the Puritans as religious founders.

One hundred years ago, the discipline of church history was well established within institutions of higher learning in Western societies. The heirs of Leopold von Ranke and Philip Schaff were well versed in the range of topics that church history comprised. Church history was an integral part of the study of theology. Church historians published handbooks and had their own journals. All church historians—those with a Catholic and those with a Protestant affiliation, the members of state churches, and those belonging to church bodies, built on the principle of voluntarism—seemed to have a common agenda. This was the story of Christian churches throughout the centuries.

The theme of church and state in modern Europe lay well-situated within the positivist genre of historical study, which served as the dominant model in the profession for generations and in some sense still does. The keystone of the positivist edifice was the commitment to the universality of reason and the efficacy of reason in achieving definitive histories written by professional historians. The functioning of rationality in historical study was exemplified in the stream of history books about male elite subjects—politics, war, diplomacy, the institutions of the state and the church, and the ideas of canonical thinkers—which flowed from the pens of male European and North American academic historians since the late nineteenth century.

If we are going to explain the slow pace of de-Christianization for the United States relative to other industrialized societies in the North Atlantic West, we might well begin with the church-state relationship. The absence of an established church in the United States has enabled religious affiliation to function, like other voluntary organizations in “civil society,” as mediators between the individual and the nation. I conimented on this rather old idea in a book C. John Sommerville is kind enough to cite in another connection, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture, but since he does not take up this point, I will develop it a bit further here, before reacting to Sommerville's other concerns as expressed in his refreshingly fair-minded rejoinder to my essay in the March 2001 issue of Church History.

As befits an article encouraging reflection, I would like to start with a personal anecdote. I recently heard a paper by a prominent literary scholar, which I thought would be an analysis of his encounter with a text. (I am familiar enough with current literary analysis to know that it would certainly not be an analysis of a text.) It turned out instead to be purely autobiographical. In talking about this later with a friend of mine from the Italian department, he told me that this was a new trend. As he put it: “We used to do Dante's life and works, then with New Criticism we did ‘the work,’ then with New Historicism we did Dante's works in their historical location, then with post-structuralism we did Dante and me, and now we just do me.’

This panel poses the question, “Is there a center to American religious history?” We historians live in a world and work in a period when the politically correct answer to the question is, “Of course not!” In this day of decentered religious historiography the celebration of radical diversity seems to prohibit any other response. In our publications and teaching we set out to expose readers and students to the rich religious pluralism in America. We catalogue the traditions that reach back to colonial times, the communities that filled out the wider spectrum of religious options during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, and the new religious movements that have appeared since the midpoint of the past century. One publication that provides a contemporary index to this inclusive catalogical approach is J. Gordon Mellon's Encyclopedia of American Religions, which in its fifth edition filled 1,150 pages with data regarding more than 2,100 discrete religious organizations in America, from the Aaronic Order to the Zoroastrian Associations in North America.

The relationship between history and tradition has long been convoluted, just as any consensus on the definition of either term is difficult to achieve. The tongue-in-cheek comment by Jean Cocteau that “history is facts which become lies in the end; legends are lies which become history in the end” is only one of many quotable quips that glance lightly off the interstices of these two universes of discourse. Such humor, nevertheless, is not that far removed from the canons of serious discussion. The realities that these two terms represent, as well as their nature, their goals, and their points of contact, provide the framework for our reflections herein.

Over the past few years I have been dealing with a narrow version of this question, as it has applied to the history of Protestantism in the twentieth century. In our book, Re-Forming the Center: American Protestantism, 1900 to the Present, Douglas Jacobsen and I argued that the two-party model of Protestantism in the United States—conservative vs. liberal, fundamentalist vs. modernist, and so on—does not take into account the remarkable complexity and diversity of the Protestant religious experience in America, and in some sense presents distorted picture of that reality. There were scholars—including Martin Marty, who generously contributed a dissenting essay to our volume—who felt that we had overstated our brief against the two-party paradigm. More relevant for our purposes this evening, there were a number of reviewers who agreed with our critique of the two-party paradigm, but who also expressed disappointment that we provided only the barest outlines of a new or better metaphor or model to explain twentieth-century American Protestantism. While I had not gone into this project thinking that we would end the day with a new interpretive paradigm, I certainly was not surprised by this critique. The very first time I gave a paper on some of our preliminary findings, there was a scholar of U.S. religious history in the audience who squirmed throughout the entirety of my remarks; when I finished, before I had the chance to ask for questions, she blurted out: “I find your argument pretty convincing, but if you can't give me a new model to replace the old one, how am I supposed to teach my course on the history of American Protestantism?” Well, we broaden the topic from Protestantism in the United States to religion in the United States, it would seem that, in many ways, this is the issue we are addressing this evening.

The three essays presented in this session raise issues that remind me of two classic representations of the problem of interpretation. In the Japanese film Rashomon, four differing and incompatible accounts of the same event are presented by the central characters, leaving the viewer to wonder which, if any, is the “true” version. Similarly, in the “Doubloon” chapter of Melville's Moby Dick, Captain Ahab nails a Spanish gold coin to the mast as a potential reward for the first man to spot the white whale; subsequently, each member of the crew gazes at the doubloon and falls into his own unique chain of associations that it evokes. Each of these fictional situations evokes the dilemma of the historian in general and the religious historian in particular: how can I deliver an accurate, persuasive, and satisfying account of my material, given the inevitable differences in perception and value that separate me not only from my professional peers but from the vast numbers of individuals and groups whose account might well be different from mine? As Stephen Stein indicates, the dilemma is not purely “academic,” since our students expect a coherent narrative from us, and will inevitably go away frustrated if we simply give them fragments that seem to form no discernible whole.