Since the early 1980's, advances in the study of gender in American history have come primarily through an unmasking of the assumptions of earlier studies. Some have questioned the explanatory power of the field's dominant interpretive paradigm, that of “women's sphere,” because this theoretical lens has often led historians to mistake what was said by and about women for their actual historical experience. Others have laid bare the earlier scholarship's assumption of universal gender definitions that do not take into account differences in women's roles based on race, class, or region. Additionally, several historians have begun to explore the influence of gender relations on the lives of men. As a result, we are beginning to get a picture of gender in American history that goes beyond the “women's sphere” experience of white, middle-class, northeastern women.

Widespread discourse about the Holocaust entered American popular culture in the seventies in two main ways: a series of television shows that purportedly focused on the destruction of European Judaism and two books that dealt specifically with the children of survivors. The television miniseries, Gerald Green's Holocaust (1978), suited the national need for simplified history and melodrama. Moreover, given the American penchant for ethnic identifiers, Holocaust became known as the Jewish Roots. The networks soon aired other Holocaust programs, including Herman Wouk's far less commercially successful The Winds of War. The resultant Holocaust discourse was frequently poorly informed and historically naive. On the one hand, it reflected a tendency in Western culture to think that the Holocaust ended definitively in 1945. On the other hand, this discourse frequently neutralized the evil of nazism.

Sociologists increasingly emphasize the systemic openness of religious organizations to their environment. Mark Kowalewski argues that the Catholic church, for example, engages in a “limited accommodation” with the broader culture in order to “rein in the forces of change and to keep modernizing elements under the control of the existing power elite.” Others suggest that the church manages its multiple identities across diverse audiences by articulating culturally adaptive discourses. Nancy Ammerman documents the responsiveness of religious organizations to political currents by demonstrating how doctrinal and ideological upheavals within the Southern Baptist Convention during the 1980's resulted in a conservative resurgence within the organization and a new administration committed to taking an activist public stance on various sociomoral issues, including abortion.

John Barnard (1654-1732) was a carpenter. Not only did this Bostonian build houses, but he also constructed, throughout his life, a spiritual edifice. As a carpenter, Barnard used the tools and materials available to him and, within the architectural conventions of his day, built homes according to his individual judgment as a craftsman. Similarly, though in a less self-conscious manner, Barnard fashioned a cosmology out of the varied building blocks available to him in the religious culture of colonial Boston: sermons, godly books, pious conversation, and prayer. As is evident from his 184-page spiritual journal kept between January 1716 and October 1719, Barnard was the active constructor of a personal piety.

By now, it is a commonplace of the American religious scene that the majority of the nation's white Protestant Christians are split into “two parties.” The ideological dividing line runs between “mainline” denominations—Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians—and a bevy of conservative denominations and groups, but it also cuts through the mainline itself, which contains a substantial contingent of conservatives.

Among the two parties' numerous disagreements, theological and political, few have run deeper and longer than their difference over the meaning and importance of evangelism, the activity of “proclaiming the gospel” to those outside the Christian community. Is the church's prime call in this regard to seek conversions to the Christian faith, or is it to show the love of Christ by working for charitable goals and social justice? A well-known 1973 study of Presbyterian clergy found that the greatest polarization between self-described “conservatives” and “liberals” came over the relative priority of evangelism and social action. Indeed, the fight over these goals was an important (though by no means the only) factor precipitating the “split” early in this century.

In 1958, C. Wright Mills delivered his “Pagan Sermon to the Christian Clergy,” a piece in which he challenged American churches to consider their complicity in the coming of World War III. Mills complained that “the verbal Christian belief in the sanctity of human life… does not itself enter decisively into the plans now being readied for World War III.… Total war ought indeed be difficult for the Christian conscience to confront, but the Christian way out makes it easy; war is defended morally and Christians easily fall into line—as they are led to justify it—in each nation in terms of Christian faith itself.”

Reports of the demise of the “warfare” school of writing the history of religion and science may yet be premature, but it seems safe to say that it has had a near-death experience. Much recent historiography has underscored the shallowness, futility, and wrongheadedness of treating controversies involving religion and science simply as skirmishes in an ongoing, inevitable conflict between contradictory ways of viewing the world. We have been urged, as historians, to probe beneath the surface of apparent conflicts in search of the underlying reasons why people with different beliefs have come to disagree so deeply about matters involving science and to accept the realities of an historically complex situation. After showing the inadequacy of the warfare thesis, David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers note sadly that “we will never find a satisfactory alternative of equal simplicity.” John Hedley Brooke, the author of a recent comprehensive study, concludes that “Serious scholarship in the history of science has revealed so extraordinarily rich and complex a relationship between science and religion in the past that general theses are difficult to sustain. The real lesson turns out to be the complexity.”

In 1917, a Baptist minister in Henderson, North Carolina, wrote to a Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) worker of the frustrations pastors encountered in teaching their parishioners a “progressive” religious ethic appropriate for the age:

Over the last decade, a noteworthy number of published studies have, in one fashion or another, been defined with reference to religious denominations. This is an arresting fact, for, coincidentally, the status of religious denominations in the society has been called into question. Some formerly powerful bodies have lost membership (at least relatively speaking) and now experience reduced influence, while newer forms of religious organization(s)—e.g., parachurch groups and loosely structured movements—have flourished. The most compelling recent analysis of religion in modern American society gives relatively little attention to them. Why, then, have publications in large numbers appeared, in scale almost seeming to be correlated inversely to this trend?

No single answer to this question is adequate. Surely one general factor is that historians often “work out of phase” with contemporary social change. If denominations have been displaced as a form of religious institution in society in the late twentieth century, then their prominence in earlier eras is all the more intriguing.