Gimme that Old Time Religion

In the beginning…

Starting out, my goals are simple: I love history and religion, and I think American religion is a particularly rich field to mine for historical gold. Because America has been primarily a Christian nation in practice, I’ll focus on various Christian sects, but I won’t look at it exclusively.

The rest of what I’m looking to do can be summed up from the about page:

Studies tell us that America is less and less a religious nation, and more and more of the population are self-identifying as non-religious.

They still believe in God, generally, but not necessarily in a specific god or path. While Europe is entering what is their third generation of a truly non-practicing public, America is seeing its first generation of not non-believers but rather unaffiliated, uncaringly unattached nonreligious.

Meanwhile, many of the more popular forms of religion have intentionally shed their traditional garb or incarnations, and as a result, America is losing not only its religion, but its religious practice and heritage. Traditional mountain hymns may get set to contemporary rock music, but the tent revivals in which those hymns were originally sung no longer happen. Reserve your own judgment whether or not this pragmatism is a good thing.

Until recently, America could still be described as a religious nation (and perhaps it still can), and the goal of this blog is to chronicle her religious practices and history. Much of the American psyche has been shaped by religion, and perhaps understanding what she is today can only be accomplished by viewing her through the lens of a religion-tinted past.