Recently, people dissatisfied with the voices of authority and seeking fulfillment elsewhere have moved beyond the boundaries of Christian tradition, either joining other religions like Buddhism or creating a religion of one — independent spirituality without doctrine or rules or boundaries. But none of it is truly new — even the most radical of modern dissidents can find role models in Quaker men and especially women in the 17th century.
The debate over the value of such dissent is also nothing new. On the one side are traditionalists who claim that focusing on internal religious experience undermines the authority and power of important social institutions and undercuts people’s necessary allegiance to social mores. On the other side are the dissidents to claim that their investment in their own experiences leads to more fulfilling religiosity and greater engagement with social concerns.
We can see the ferocity of this debate in two, widely separate social situations. At the one end, before America was even a nation, were Quaker dissidents and evangelists who came to Massachusettes Bay Colony, where the Puritans maintained religious and political authority. There was no religious freedom, and the Quakers were persecuted harshly. They were put on trial, exiled, and some were even executed.
At the other end is the 1960s, a decade symbolized by radical individualism, free love, and great religious dissent. All over the country, young people rejected the authority of tradition and institutions and turned instead the authority of internal experience, banding together with others who felt the same way. Complaints were much the same — such actions eroded the moral authority of social institutions and would lead to moral decay.
Porterfield uses intellectual history to connect those two divergent times, tracing developments from Puritan theology in the 17th and 18th centuries to the birth and growth of Transcendentalism in the 19th century. She continues through movements that changed evangelical Protestant control of American culture into a more pluralistic and perception of religion.
Along the way, she explains twentieth-century developments such as the liberalization and redefinition of Protestant missionary work; the growth of American Catholicism and its increased acceptance by the Protestant mainstream; the Vietnam War and the questioning of traditional religion; the growth of Buddhism in America; the raising of gender consciousness through feminism; and the explosion of religious studies programs at secular universities.
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