AMERICAN RELIGIOUS HISTORIOGRAPHY: WILLIAM WARREN SWEET, PERRY MILLER AND SIDNEY E. MEAD (CHURCH, EVANGELICALISM, PROTESTANTISM)

Sweet, Miller, and Mead explicated American Protestantism, its institutional and intellectual significance. Responding to scientific history and to American Church History as it developed from the 1890's through the 1930's, their analyses transcended those of ecclesiastical and academic predecessors. Sweet narrated the development of the dominant churches of the nineteenth century and charted their transformation into the twentieth century. Mead examined religious freedom, denominationalism, and the intellectual role of American religious leaders. Miller explicated Puritanism and evangelicalism as dimensions of American identity and as spiritual-intellectual discourse. Sweet and Mead's historiographical assumptions are analyzed in the context of academic and church historiography, with particular attention to the "Chicago School." Miller's work is a critical response to scientific history and the Progressivism of James Robinson, Charles Beard and Vernon Parrington. Together, these historians convey a synoptic interpretation of American religion which assumes American exceptionalism and a thematic foundation first articulated by nineteenth-century evangelicals. The "Great Tradition" of Protestant historiography undergirds and is partly replicated in their work. Synthetic treatments of religion by Robert Baird, Daniel Dorchester and Leonard W. Bacon had presupposed evangelical dominance and the normative function of Protestant mission within the nation. Their writings on religious freedom, the voluntary association as a principal mode of Protestant spirituality, and the relation of Protestant mission to national identity influenced Sweet, Miller and Mead as they articulated a broadened vision of American religious history.