Religion and Culture in America

This list combines two categories of books: classic and early works in the sociology and theory of religions and newer works in religion and culture in the U.S.
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Italian Harlem’s festa to La Madonna de Monte Carmelo, New York, NY
Theory and Overviews
  • Albanese, Catherine L. A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
  • Asad, Talal. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
  • Bender, Courtney. The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2010.
  • Braude, Ann. Sisters and Saints. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
  • Brekus, Catherine A. The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past. Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
  • Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Reprint Edition. New York: Free Press, 1965.
  • Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion. Translated by Willard R. Trask. New York: Harcourt, 1987.
  • Evans, Curtis J. The Burden of Black Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
  • Fox, Richard Wightman. Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession. San Francisco: Harper, 2004.
  • Hutchison, William R. The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976.
  • Marty, Martin E. Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America. New York: Doubleday, 1970.
  • McGreevy, John T. Catholicism and American Freedom: A History. Reprint edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.
  • Moore, R. Laurence. Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
  • Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
  • Orsi, Robert A. Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005.
  • Pals, Daniel L. Seven Theories of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
  • Prothero, Stephen. American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon. Reprint edition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.
  • Sarna, Jonathan D. American Judaism: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
  • Schmidt, Leigh Eric, and Sally M. Promey. American Religious Liberalism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012.
  • Smith, Jonathan Z. Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
  • Stein, Stephen J. Communities of Dissent: A History of Alternative Religions in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
  • Taves, Ann. Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009.
  • Turner, Victor W. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine, 1969.
  • Tweed, Thomas A. Retelling U.S. Religious History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
  • Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Reprint Edition. New York: Scribner, 1958.

Religion and American Culture
  • Baker, Kelly J. Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930. Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 2011.
  • Brekus, Catherine A. Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
  • Chidester, David. Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
  • Duggan, Lisa. Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.
  • Gedge, Karin E. Without Benefit of Clergy: Women and the Pastoral Relationship in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
  • Gilbert, James. Redeeming Culture: American Religion in an Age of Science. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1998.
  • Hankins, Barry. Jesus and Gin: Evangelicalism, the Roaring Twenties and Today’s Culture Wars. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
  • Johnson, Paul E., and Sean Wilentz. The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
  • Laderman, Gary. Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
  • McGarry, Molly. Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.
  • Noonan, John T., Jr. The Lustre of Our Country: The American Experience of Religious Freedom. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
  • Orsi, Robert A. Thank You, St. Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
  • Porterfield, Amanda. Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
  • Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality. San Francisco: Harper, 2005.
  • Taves, Ann. Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1999.