Abstract
A Nation with the Soul of a Church: How Christian Proclamation Has Shaped American History
O.C. Edwards, Jr., with James Dunkly
Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2013. 367 pp. $58.00
O.C. Edwards, Jr. covered 20 centuries and multiple continents in A History of Preaching (Abingdon Press), his monumental publication from 2004. That book provided one of the most comprehensive one-volume histories of preaching ever published. A Nation with the Soul of a Church, Edwards’s latest book, written with James Dunkly, focuses more tightly on the history of preaching in the United States. This focus lets the authors treat individual preachers and sermons in more detail. And those details make the book a significant extension of Edwards’s already significant legacy.
Edwards and Dunkly consider 19 different instances of Christian proclamation from figures that range from John Winthrop to Jeremiah Wright. Each chapter gives a brief biography of the preacher, some historical context for the sermon, and a careful summary of the sermon itself. Through this structure the chapters make clear the ways that sermons “shaped American history,” as the subtitle claims. If a sermon was never the sole cause of historical change, the authors argue, it could at least give people words to understand changes that were underway, and so shape the ways those changes happened. Each chapter makes good on this claim, successfully showing a sermon’s role in some historical process.
The book’s combination of detailed sermon summaries with larger historical narratives sets it apart from competing volumes, which tend to focus on either text or context to the exclusion of the other. The insightful summaries of older sermons, especially, will be helpful to readers for whom these texts can feel far away.
The book might be even stronger if it pressed past summaries to do more critical analysis of how the sermons worked. Adding this level of analysis would deepen the book’s account of how the sermon shaped history, for rhetoric and performance often mattered at least as much as the kind of content that a summary can capture. Attention to matters of form and style would also make the book more useful to contemporary preachers who want to reflect on the significance of their own patterns of rhetoric and performance.
The book does not claim to break new ground in terms of research. It rather offers what the authors call an haute vulgarization—a “high popularization”—of the original research of others (xi). The sources are generally excellent. But they would be strengthened by the addition of more recent studies that recognize the significance of regions other than New England for the history of Christianity in what became the United States. The first six chapters of the book all focus on sermons from New England traditions. The book does not leave New England until 1860, and even after this date it returns repeatedly to the region’s legacies. This focus reflects an older generation of scholarship that put the Puritans, their opponents, and their descendants at the center of any story about religion in America. And John Winthrop, Anne Hutchinson, Jonathan Edwards, Jonathan Mayhew, William Ellery Channing, and Ralph Waldo Emerson are all important preachers. But more recent scholarship has made clear the importance of other regions and other traditions for any book that wants to tell a comprehensive story about this “nation with the soul of a church.”
Edwards and Dunkly acknowledge the disproportionate number of “male white Anglo-Saxon Protestants” (if not the number of New Englanders) in the book. They defend this emphasis by arguing that “the book does not attempt to deal with what should have been but with what actually was.” But if the standard is cultural significance—what actually was—then the book needs to include more people like Francis Asbury, the itinerating bishop who did so much to build the Methodist movement into a denomination that dwarfed Channing’s Unitarianism; or Charles Finney, the preacher who corralled the democratic energies of revivals into respectable forms; or Aimee Semple McPherson, the star who pioneered the use of mass media and founded an important Pentecostal denomination; or J.M. Gates, the African American preacher whose sermons not only helped build the record industry but also provided a soundtrack for the Great Migration.
No manageable volume could ever tell every story that needs to be told. Thus to point out the significance of neglected preachers is less a criticism of the book than a call for more books like it. And we do need more books like A Nation with the Soul of a Church. It makes clear the importance of histories of preaching for understanding Christianity in the United States and for the renewal of the practice today.