Darren Dochuk - Böcker

In the last few decades, all major presidential candidates have openly discussed the role of faith in their lives, sharing their religious beliefs and church commitments with the media and their constituencies. And yet, to the surprise of many Americans, God played almost no role in the 2012 presidential campaign. During the campaign, incumbent Barack Obama minimized the role of religion in his administration and in his life. This was in stark contrast to his emphasis, in 2008, on how his Chicago church had nurtured him as a person, community organizer, and politician, which ultimately backfired when incendiary messages preached by his liberationist pastor Jeremiah Wright went viral. The Republican Party faced a different kind of problem in 2012, with the increasing irrelevance or absence of founders of the Religious Right such as Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell. Furthermore, with Mormon Mitt Romney running as the GOP candidate, party operatives avoided shining a spotlight on religion, recognizing that vast numbers of Americans remain suspicious of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The absence of God during the 2012 election reveals that the United States is at a crossroads with regards to faith, even while religion continues to play a central role in almost every facet of American culture and political life. The separation of church and state and the disestablishment of religion have fostered a rich religious marketplace characterized by innovation and entrepreneurship. As the generation that launched the culture wars fades into history and a new, substantially more diverse population matures, the question of how faith is functioning in the new millennium has become more important than ever. In Faith in the New Millennium historians, sociologists, and religious studies scholars tackle contemporary issues, controversies, and policies ranging from drone wars to presidential campaigns to the exposing of religious secrets in order to make sense of American life in the new millennium. This melding of past and present offers readers a rare opportunity to assess Americans' current wrestling with matters of faith, and provides valuable insight into the many ways that faith has shaped and transformed the age of Obama and how the age of Obama has shaped American religious faith.

In the last few decades, all major presidential candidates have openly discussed the role of faith in their lives, sharing their religious beliefs and church commitments with the media and their constituencies. And yet, to the surprise of many Americans, God played almost no role in the 2012 presidential campaign. During the campaign, incumbent Barack Obama minimized the role of religion in his administration and in his life. This was in stark contrast to his emphasis, in 2008, on how his Chicago church had nurtured him as a person, community organizer, and politician, which ultimately backfired when incendiary messages preached by his liberationist pastor Jeremiah Wright went viral. The Republican Party faced a different kind of problem in 2012, with the increasing irrelevance or absence of founders of the Religious Right such as Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell. Furthermore, with Mormon Mitt Romney running as the GOP candidate, party operatives avoided shining a spotlight on religion, recognizing that vast numbers of Americans remain suspicious of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The absence of God during the 2012 election reveals that the United States is at a crossroads with regards to faith, even while religion continues to play a central role in almost every facet of American culture and political life. The separation of church and state and the disestablishment of religion have fostered a rich religious marketplace characterized by innovation and entrepreneurship. As the generation that launched the culture wars fades into history and a new, substantially more diverse population matures, the question of how faith is functioning in the new millennium has become more important than ever. In Faith in the New Millennium historians, sociologists, and religious studies scholars tackle contemporary issues, controversies, and policies ranging from drone wars to presidential campaigns to the exposing of religious secrets in order to make sense of American life in the new millennium. This melding of past and present offers readers a rare opportunity to assess Americans' current wrestling with matters of faith, and provides valuable insight into the many ways that faith has shaped and transformed the age of Obama and how the age of Obama has shaped American religious faith.

The evangelical embrace of conservatism is a familiar feature of the contemporary political landscape. What's less well-known, however, is that the connection predates the Reagan revolution, going all the way back to the Depression and World War II. Evangelical businessman at the time were quite active in opposing the New Deal on both theological and economic grounds and in doing so claimed a place alongside other conservatives in the public sphere. Like previous generations of devout laymen, they self-consciously merged their religious and business lives, financing and organizing evangelical causes with the kind of visionary pragmatism that they practiced in the boardroom. In God's Businessmen, Sarah Ruth Hammond explores not only these men's personal trajectories but also those of the service clubs and other institutions that, like them, believed that businessmen were God's instrument for the Christianization of the world. Hammond presents a capacious portrait of the relationship between the evangelical business community and the New Deal and in doing so makes important contributions to American religious history, business history, and the history of the American state.

How evangelical businessmen in the 1930s and 1940s joined their religious and business lives.The evangelical embrace of conservatism is a familiar feature of the contemporary political landscape. What’s less well-known, however, is that the connection predates the Reagan revolution, going all the way back to the Depression and World War II. Evangelical businessmen at the time were quite active in opposing the New Deal—on both theological and economic grounds—and in doing so claimed a place alongside other conservatives in the public sphere. Like previous generations of devout laymen, they self-consciously merged their religious and business lives, financing and organizing evangelical causes with the kind of visionary pragmatism that they practiced in the boardroom.In God’s Businessmen, Sarah Ruth Hammond explores not only these men’s personal trajectories but also those of the service clubs and other institutions that, like them, believed that businessmen were God’s instrument for the Christianization of the world. Hammond presents a capacious portrait of the relationship between the evangelical business community and the New Deal—and in doing so makes important contributions to American religious history, business history, and the history of the American state.

No living scholar has shaped the study of American religious history more profoundly than George M. Marsden. His work spans U.S. intellectual, cultural, and religious history from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries. This collection of essays uses the career of George M. Marsden and the remarkable breadth of his scholarship to measure current trends in the historical study of American evangelical Protestantism and to encourage fresh scholarly investigation of this faith tradition as it has developed between the eighteenth century and the present. Moving through five sections, each centered around one of Marsden's major books and the time period it represents, the volume explores different methodologies and approaches to the history of evangelicalism and American religion. Besides assessing Marsden's illustrious works on their own terms, this collection's contributors isolate several key themes as deserving of fresh, rigorous, and extensive examination. Through their close investigation of these particular themes, they expand the range of characters and communities, issues and ideas, and contingencies that can and should be accounted for in our historical texts. Marsden's timeless scholarship thus serves as a launchpad for new directions in our rendering of the American religious past.

No living scholar has shaped the study of American religious history more profoundly than George M. Marsden. His work spans U.S. intellectual, cultural, and religious history from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries. This collection of essays uses the career of George M. Marsden and the remarkable breadth of his scholarship to measure current trends in the historical study of American evangelical Protestantism and to encourage fresh scholarly investigation of this faith tradition as it has developed between the eighteenth century and the present. Moving through five sections, each centered around one of Marsden's major books and the time period it represents, the volume explores different methodologies and approaches to the history of evangelicalism and American religion. Besides assessing Marsden's illustrious works on their own terms, this collection's contributors isolate several key themes as deserving of fresh, rigorous, and extensive examination. Through their close investigation of these particular themes, they expand the range of characters and communities, issues and ideas, and contingencies that can and should be accounted for in our historical texts. Marsden's timeless scholarship thus serves as a launchpad for new directions in our rendering of the American religious past.

This volume reframes the narrative that has too often dominated the field of historical study of religion and politics: the culture wars.Influenced by culture war theories first introduced in the 1990s, much of the recent history of modern American religion and politics is written in a mode that takes for granted the enduring partisan divides that can blind us to the complex and dynamic intersections of faith and politics. The contributors to Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars argue that such narratives do not tell the whole story of religion and politics in the modern age.This collection of essays, authored by leading scholars in American religious and political history, challenges readers to look past familiar clashes over social issues to appreciate the ways in which faith has fueled twentieth-century U.S. politics beyond predictable partisan divides and across a spectrum of debates ranging from environment to labor, immigration to civil rights, domestic legislation to foreign policy. Offering fresh illustrations drawn from a range of innovative primary sources, theories, and methods, these essays emphasize that our rendering of religion and politics in the twentieth century must appreciate the intersectionality of identities, interests, and motivations that transpire and exist outside an unbending dualistic paradigm.Contributors: Darren Dochuk, Janine Giordano Drake, Joseph Kip Kosek, Josef Sorett, Patrick Q. Mason, Wendy L. Wall, Mark Brilliant, Andrew Preston, Matthew Avery Sutton, Kathleen Sprows Cummings, Benjamin Francis-Fallon, Michelle Nickerson, Keith Makoto Woodhouse, Kate Bowler, and James T. Kloppenberg.

The Routledge History of the Twentieth-Century United States is a comprehensive introduction to the most important trends and developments in the study of modern United States history. Driven by interdisciplinary scholarship, the thirty-four original chapters underscore the vast range of identities, perspectives and tensions that contributed to the growth and contested meanings of the United States in the twentieth century. The chronological and topical breadth of the collection highlights critical political and economic developments of the century while also drawing attention to relatively recent areas of research, including borderlands, technology and disability studies. Dynamic and flexible in its possible applications, The Routledge History of the Twentieth-Century United States offers an exciting new resource for the study of modern American history.

From Bible Belt to Sun Belt tells the dramatic and largely unknown story of “plain-folk” religious migrants: hardworking men and women from Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas who fled the Depression and came to California for military jobs during World War II. Investigating this fiercely pious community at a grassroots level, Darren Dochuk uses the stories of religious leaders, including Billy Graham, as well as many colorful, lesser-known figures to explain how evangelicals organized a powerful political machine. This machine made its mark with Barry Goldwater, inspired Richard Nixon’s “Southern Solution,” and achieved its greatest triumph with the victories of Ronald Reagan. Based on entirely new research, the manuscript has already won the prestigious Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians. The judges wrote, “Dochuk offers a rich and multidimensional perspective on the origins of one of the most far-ranging developments of the second half of the twentieth century: the rise of the New Right and modern conservatism.”

Anointed with Oil is a groundbreaking new history of the United States that places the relationship between religious faith and oil together at the center of America's rise to global power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As prize-winning historian Darren Dochuk reveals, from the earliest discovery of oil in America during the Civil War, Americans saw oil as the nation's special blessing and its peculiar burden, the source of its prophetic mission in the world. Over the century that followed and down to the present day, the oil industry's leaders and its ordinary workers together fundamentally transformed American religion, business, and politics--boosting America's ascent as the preeminent global power, giving shape to modern evangelical Christianity, fueling the rise of the Republican Right, and setting the terms for today's political and environmental uncertainties.Through extensive research in corporate, political, and community archives in the US and around the world, Dochuk brings to life a vast cast of characters: oil hunters, executives, powerbrokers, politicians, muckrakers, preachers, and ordinary oil patch residents. He profiles the generations of geologists and wildcat drillers who understood petroleum as a blessing from God, and the oil executives who developed an ideology of high-risk, high-reward entrepreneurialism by fusing notions of earthly dominion with trust in the supernatural. He examines how many oil workers and their families weathered the boom-bust economies of extraction zones like the Southwest by drawing closer to Christ. And he recounts how, after making their fortunes in "big oil," families such as the Rockefellers constructed enormous philanthropies and sought to uplift America and the world according to Judeo-Christian values and a vision of well-ordered markets--even as other independent tycoons who embraced a more fervent "wildcat religion" and enthusiasm for laissez-faire capitalism eventually dethroned these centrists and helped to usher conservatives like Ronald Reagan and George Bush to victory.Ranging from the Civil War to the present, from West Texas to Saudi Arabia to the Alberta Tar Sands, and from oil patch boomtowns to the White House, Anointed with Oil a sweeping, magisterial book that transforms how we understand modern America.

Coined by Republican strategist Kevin Phillips in 1969 to describe the new alloy of conservatism that united voters across the southern rim of the country, the term "Sunbelt" has since gained currency in the American lexicon. By the early 1970s, the region had come to embody economic growth and an ambitious political culture. With sprawling suburban landscapes, cities like Atlanta, Dallas, and Los Angeles seemed destined to sap influence from the Northeast. Corporate entrepreneurialism and a conservative ethos helped forge the Sunbelt's industrial-labor relations, military spending, education systems, and neighborhood development. Unprecedented migration to the region ensured that these developments worked in concert with sojourners' personal quests for work, family, community, and leisure. In the resplendent Sunbelt the nation seemed to glimpse the American Dream remade.The essays in Sunbelt Rising deploy new analytic tools to explain this region's dramatic rise. Contributors to the volume study the Sunbelt as both a physical entity and a cultural invention. They examine the raised highway, the sprawling prison complex, and the fast-food restaurant as distinctive material contours of a region. In this same vein they delineate distinctive Sunbelt models of corporate and government organization, which came to shape so many aspects of the nation's political and economic future. Contributors also examine literature, religion, and civic engagement to illustrate how a particular Sunbelt cultural sensibility arose that ordered people's lives in a period of tumultuous change. By exploring the interplay between the Sunbelt as a structurally defined space and a culturally imagined place, Sunbelt Rising addresses longstanding debates about region as a category of analysis.

This comprehensive reference work brings together a diverse cross-section of established and emerging historians to explore the broad and deep history of Bible-believing, born-again Protestantism, and its dynamic impact on American life and society.The first part of this handbook features nine chronological chapters outlining the history and historiography of evangelicalism in the lands that became the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. In the second part, eighteen thematic chapters examine different aspects of evangelical history, including particular worship traditions within evangelicalism (such as Anabaptism and Pentecostalism); evangelical Christianity within diasporic communities (such as Asian Americans and Latinos/as); and the intersections of evangelicalism with other aspects of U.S. history—from consumer capitalism and pop culture to sexuality and foreign relations. Together, these deep, wide-ranging, and tempered readings of religious history seek to anchor conversations on evangelicalism in its fuller permutations: as an intellectual and ecclesiastical tradition, a political force, a social influence, and a cultural phenomenon.The Routledge History of Evangelical Christianity in America is an essential guide for scholars, graduate students, seminarians, advanced undergraduates in secular and religious universities, and general readers of American history interested in the current state of the field.