The contingency of American religious history dominated the panel I participated on at the American Society for Church History conference, January 4, 2015. As I mentioned last week, the panel’s participants (beside me) included Andrew Preston, Christine Heyrman, Darryl Hart, and Leo Ribuffo–Leo is the originator of the question above. The panel’s purpose was broadly to take some measure of the questions littering the historiographical landscape in relation to our general understanding of religion and U.S. foreign policy. I took Preston’s book, Sword of Spirit, Shield of Faith, as the touchstone for discussions of that landscape. And while the panel Read more