Turning Points in the U.S.A.
Turning Points in American Church History: How Pivotal Events Shaped a Nation and a Faith by Elesha J. Coffman (Baker Academic, 2024)
Reviewed by Michael Jimenez
The great American novelist, William Faulkner, once wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” (68). Our contemporary problems have a deep-rooted history. How can we gain this sense of the past in the present, as Faulkner recommends, if we continually suffer from historical amnesia? The story of American history involves its own set of issues, but what happens when the focus is American Christian history? Furthermore, how does one tell this story in an enjoyable and memorable way?
Much like Mark Noll’s classic book Turning Points, that covers major events throughout two thousand plus years of church history, Baylor historian Elesha Coffman’s book examines key moments in five hundred plus years of U.S. church history in a creative and readable way. This book is important because of the general lack of books and survey courses taught focused solely on American church history. Coffman opens her introduction stating that, on the one hand, the average American probably does not “feel a burning need to know about American church history” but, on the other hand, American history has debts to Christianity so avoiding religion provides an incomplete historical picture (1).
The use of “turning points” to structure the book is strategic, getting away from the typical textbook that tries to give the reader too much general knowledge, forcing the narrative to read like an encyclopedia. Instead, Coffman highlights some key, but oftentimes lesser-known events and relates them to the more familiar periodization. As Noll writes in the book’s Foreword, this structure is beneficial because of “its ability to transform readers from passive consumers into active participants” (x). To Noll’s point about active participants, these turning points are not carved in stone. One fun exercise is to think of alternatives based on other historical events.
Coffman makes the decision to start with the year 1588 and the English defeat of the Spanish Armada. Why 1588 and not 1492 or 1607? First, it serves as a historical entry point for even the possibility of English colonies. Second, it reminds the reader that Spanish colonization and exploration was already happening for almost one hundred years by then. Beginning the book this way reminds the reader of the diversity that was already found in the New World and that English hegemony in the New World was not a foregone conclusion, moving the narrative away from the typical starting point of the English colonies in 1607. Another recent book that examined the significance of the non-English presence in the early Americas and the intersection of that with colonial religion is Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons, by Kirsten Silva Gruesz (Harvard University Press, 2022).
Coffman continues to present an atypical version of American Christian history by centering Native American figures like the Mohegan minister Samson Occom and the twentieth century Dakota Sioux writer Zitkála-Šá in a sweeping overview of American history. The strategy of sandwiching a chapter on King Philip’s War, which symbolizes a fracture in the English colonists and Native American relationship, between chapters on Roger Williams and George Whitefield is helpful since this narrative covers aspects of the Founding documents, especially religious freedom, and the Protestant awakenings of the eighteenth century, without ignoring exactly what happened to Native Americans. Coffman chooses not to make the American Revolution a turning point but uses these three chapters to provide context of the religious movements that set the stage for national politics. With regards to Native Americans, by taking a long view perspective she frames the evolving narrative since King Philip’s War.
National politics often takes a back seat in the book. For example, in the next chapters on the rise of African American churches, the beginning of the Catholic Church in America, and the birth of Protestant American Missions. Chapters on African American Christianity and Missions sandwich the American Civil War illustrating the impact national politics had on Christianity.
American racial tensions are a key thread throughout the whole book culminating in the latter chapter about the Civil Rights movement. Whereas Coffman centers Native Americans in one chapter, she follows the general American narrative by delineating the struggle of African Americans throughout history, including their own relationship to Christianity, in a few chapters. Dealing with the topic of the Civil Rights movement, Coffman uses the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, resulting in the murder of four girls, and the ministry of Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth as her lens to examine this period. She covers a lot of ground in this chapter on a topic that might be more familiar to the reader, but by making Shuttlesworth and not Martin Luther King Jr. as her guide, Coffman illustrates that there remains a lot about the Civil Rights movement that a typical textbook does not cover.
The last section of the book opens the twentieth century with the Azusa Street Revival and the genesis of Pentecostalism, followed by the sensationalized Scopes Monkey Trial. The events around Azusa at the beginning of the century continue to be perceived as a crucial historical movement, especially in forming American and global Christianity into the twenty-first century. Coffman corrects that binary view of science versus religion in the Scopes Trial, revealing that the familiar framing has more to do with media representation than the historical moment itself.
In some ways, Coffman’s book traces a five-hundred-year history on how we got here. Coffman shows that the closer we get to contemporary times, Christianity takes on a more democratic tone, which has its advantages and disadvantages. The book closes with the election of Ronald Reagan and the rise of the “conservative Christian vote” (259). Coffman claims that the current political polarization has its roots in this time (263). Recent history can often feel like entering a battlefield because some of the players of the narrative are still alive and have a vested interest in how they are remembered. The so-called culture wars and other debates about the events and policies of the last few decades will go on for the near future. Coffman’s study helps add a much needed historical, particularly Christian context to these conversations.
The book is clearly structured for use in a history class at a Christian university or a seminary. It is like getting the notes for each chapter’s lesson plan. Each chapter is also bookended by a hymn and prayer applicable to the theme. But Coffman’s book is a helpful guide for anyone interested in the history of American Christianity. Due to the use of “turning points,” a companion book that highlights Pope Francis’s list of most impactful American religious figures―Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day―would likely complement Coffman’s contextual history well. Lincoln and King are briefly mentioned; Merton and Day are not. Moreover, Cesar Chavez, perhaps the most famous religious Latino, also is not mentioned. Again, the point of utilizing turning points is the freedom to highlight an event that helps look at the historical big picture, which this book does well.
According to Coffman: “History teaches. It rebukes. It shows crooked places that need to be set straight and wounds that need to be healed” (280). Unfortunately, Americans tend to avoid history and its sober lessons. Perhaps this book may help start the healing process.
Michael Jimenez is an Associate Professor of history at Vanguard University. He is the author of Remembering Lived Lives: A Historiography from the Underside of Modernity and Karl Barth and the Study of the Religious Enlightenment: Encountering the Task of History.
