After centuries of delighting children, the jack-in-the-box earned a recognition in 2005 reserved for the best in the business: induction into the United States’ Toy Hall of Fame. Created in Renaissance Europe, the crank-up plaything’s popularity grew over time until it surged in the mid-twentieth century. When tin and plastic replaced its cruder materials and mass production made possible mass consumption by middle-class parents, the jack-in-the-box captured kids’ imaginations like never before. By 1960, several companies were marketing their versions of the toy and raking in profits by enticing children with a wind-up that always produced surprise. At the moment of its Hall of Fame induction, it was no longer the go-to source of instant gratification it once had been, but the tribute was well-deserved, for, by then, youngsters across generations and nations had gleefully begged their moms and dads to “Do it again!”Footnote ¹

It may be a stretch to credit Yale University historian Jon Butler with some of the toy’s hall-of-fame success, but there is little doubt that the 2004 publication of his article “Jack-in-the-Box Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History” in the Journal of American History (JAH) signaled a clever new use for the device: as metaphor for what was ailing the profession.Footnote ² Who knew that a lighthearted simile could shoulder so much analytical weight?

Upon publication, Butler’s appraisal immediately registered with historians of religion as a deft description of the challenges that they and their scholarship faced in the academy. Religion was handled haphazardly in “mainstream” modern U.S. history, they agreed. Despite all the efforts of those writing modern U.S. history’s prevailing narratives to craft sophisticated books that foregrounded its sustained hold on society, faith remained marginalized by them. Nodding in agreement with Butler, they complained that most of their peers continued to treat faith as an agent of history that popped up suddenly, surprised (and scared!) people, then retreated to the shadows to wait for the next release. Yet religion was not so easily relegated to the darkness, and its most earnest students joined Butler in demanding that all historians appreciate that truth.

Meanwhile, the broader readership of non-religious historians that encountered Butler’s JAH piece seemed to connect with the metaphor, as well. Simple and portable, the jack-in-the-box comparison dealt with a conspicuous gap in historiography by way of a catchy phrase. It is impossible to measure the extent to which such playfulness made the article’s claims more digestible, but if citation impact is to be taken seriously, it seems evident that the strategy had its desired effect. In the months and years that followed publication of “Jack-in-the-Box Faith,” numerous historians across several different areas of specialization joined historians of religion in referencing Butler’s piece, seizing on its colorful illustration to accentuate the point that religion needed to be taken seriously by anyone writing and teaching the recent American past.Footnote ³

Of course, Butler’s article’s real impact stemmed from its substance more than from its flair. Behind the glib allusion to a pop-up clown rested a layered argument with multifaceted application. First, and as already alluded to, Butler’s essay underscored the egregious absence of religion in extant chronicles of post-1870s American life. The esteemed early-America historian drove home the point that faith had received no shortage of notice where pre-Civil War developments, his specialty, were concerned. “It has seldom been possible, much less wise,” he charged at the outset of his piece, “to assess American history before the Civil War without taking religion seriously.” From Puritan New England to the middle colonies, the South to the frontier—be it pertaining to the pre-Revolutionary period or the onset of the Civil War, anti-slavery activism or temperance—“scholarship of the pre-Civil War United States read by nearly every American history Ph.D. candidate since the 1950s, has long featured religion at almost every critical interpretive point,” he asserted. That was not the case for post-Civil War U.S. history. “Religion has not fared well in the historiography of modern America,” he bemoaned. To be sure, Butler listed several examples of groundbreaking texts that proved religion’s traction in post-1870s American society. The problem, he explained, was that such works “constitute much less of the scholarship on their era than religiously engaged books do of the scholarship on the colonial, early national, and antebellum eras.” “More important,” he added, “they stand outside the interpretive mainstream, which overwhelmingly finds religion in modern America more anomalous than normal and more innocuous than powerful.”Footnote ⁴

Butler pointed to the “paucity of religion in U.S. history texts” as one illustration of the void—illustration helped by a survey conducted by his colleague in the profession, the prominent U.S. cultural historian Paul Boyer. Boyer had found that elementary and secondary history textbooks tended to avoid sustained treatment of religion in the modern era. For reasons related to (among other factors) publishers’ “caution in approaching the ‘religion question’ and their misplaced fears of violating the separation of church and state,” matters and personalities of faith tended to be cordoned off, certainly with a deliberate intent not evinced in pre-Civil War U.S. history texts. Butler’s lively take on Boyer’s findings followed. Whether in high school textbooks or—more to the point—in university lecture classes and scholarship, post-Civil-War-era religion was largely ignored: “As with a child’s jack-in-the-box, the surprise offered by the color or peculiarity of the figure is seldom followed by an extended performance, much less substance.” People, ideas, and institutions of faith were, in Butler’s estimation, rarely connected to “larger enduring patterns in American life. Figures and events appear as momentary, idiosyncratic thrustings up of impulses from a more distant American past or as foils for a more persistent secular history.”Footnote ⁵

Here Butler singled out extant historiographies of the civil rights movement and evangelical right as proof. While scholars invested in the former focused on politics at the cost of understanding the religious reflexes behind much of the action, students of the latter tended to lose sight of conservative Protestants between the Scopes Trial in 1925 and the founding of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority in 1979. The result of this oversight, in Butler’s opinion, was an abandonment of history’s disciplinary advantage to paint the past with “suppleness” and nuance, with openness to “society’s broadest, most complex, and sometimes contradictory transformations.” Were religion more central to histories of civil rights and religious conservatism, imagine what students would learn about how faith-based activism has animated the full political spectrum consistently through time. Were religion central to these stories, imagine how everyone would come to understand “modern American history itself” anew.Footnote ⁶

Butler’s second argumentative strand interlaced his first. Considering faith’s relegation to the margins, it was time for historians to be less deferential to turn-of-the-twentieth-century social scientists who equated modernity with secularization. The “religion problem” rested on the conviction stemming from cruder secularization theories that posited post-1870 American society (like other western societies) was destined to see religion recede in import. Even when theoretical concessions were made to allow for the sustained presence of faith in private life, the overriding confidence among social scientists was that as time went on, the sacred would retreat from the public sphere. Such presumptions, Butler complained, paralyzed the profession. By accepting the inevitability of secularization, historians, on one hand, overestimated religion’s “ubiquitous power in the preindustrial, preurban West, including America,” and on the other underestimated “the remarkable persistence in twentieth-century America” of robust personal religiosity that not only animated home, hearth, and pew, but also shaped civil society. In order to escape such paralysis, Butler asserted, historians needed to carve out analytical space for the sacred’s workings in surprising as well as predictable domains—in purportedly secular realms where attachments to the supernatural led to unanticipated yet real, structural, societal turns.Footnote ⁷

On that point, Butler added qualifiers as well as prompts that could help historians escape the quandary of secular assumptions. The “religion problem,” he noted, was not the product of “advocacy history”—the “promotion of religion through published histories or courses” or the “interpretation of historical developments from a religious perspective.” Rather, Butler directed his complaint at those who had been most responsible for leaving religion out of the picture: secular scholars whose evasion of religion created the gap. Still, his was a critique of advocacy history as well, that sort of insider’s history, written with hearts on sleeves, that did equal damage to the enterprise by injecting theology (and teleology) into the craft. And in championing a fuller history with faith threaded through, Butler also urged students of the modern United States to eschew sanctimony; to avoid the trap of writing religious history through rose-tinted glasses as if divine blessing drove it to providential ends. Because “religion’s frequent claims for transcendence produce questionable and horrific behavior—fraud, sexual abuse, group suicide, and apocalyptically driven mass homicide in the name of the divine—critical discernment is at least as important as it is in writing secular history.” “A persistently happy history of religion in modern America could scarcely be an accurate history,” Butler stressed, “since religion has too often only roiled the waters of our national dilemmas and disgraces.”Footnote ⁸

Besides exposing the plights of religion in mainstream U.S. history, he also took time to highlight three initial areas in which a foregrounding of faith could enhance the discipline. His targets included the need to address (a) the overriding presumptions of secularization in the post-1870 period by attending to the gray areas between sacred-secular poles; (b) the reality of religion’s sustained “importance in twentieth-century American politics and elections”; and (c) “religion’s adaptive capacities in the face of modernity’s technological, economic, and intellectual challenges.” For the remainder of his think piece, he fleshed out each prompt, providing a surfeit of examples of how scholars of religion had already started plugging these gaps, as well as parting encouragement for all historians of the modern United States to follow the lead and fill the voids with collective resolve. “Until religion does die out in American public and private life,” Butler concluded, “historians need to understand it as commonplace but also transformed in modern American history, not as exceptional or anomalous.”Footnote ⁹

Twenty-one years after Butler issued his broad appeal, with a generation of historical scholarship in the rear view, it is worth measuring the degree to which his peers have responded to the challenge. At first glance, it seems they responded well, at least initially. In the wake of Butler’s call, historians certainly seemed determined to render some of Butler’s nudges a bit dated. Fresh study of the long civil rights movement, which more heavily drew on religious sources, and the Christian right, which connected Scopes to Falwell (and Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump), soon made point “b” less salient. That said, the jury is still out on whether the guild has answered Butler’s broader exhortation for historians of all stripes to take religion seriously as a difference maker in modern America. As the essays in this retrospective forum illustrate with reference to specific subfields, gains witnessed in the aftermath of Butler’s article were accompanied by conspicuous silences as well.Footnote ¹⁰

Still, the renaissance of religion in U.S. historiography that immediately followed Butler’s appeal was consequential; not that Butler was initially willing or able to concede that point. While delivering his presidential address for the Organization of American Historians (OAH) in 2016, he again bemoaned the continued “hampered capacity” among fellow historians to appreciate religion’s entrenchments in the secular age. Referencing his current research on turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York, he voiced frustration with the way urban historians in particular had adopted, unquestioningly, Max Weber’s characterization of the modern world. The “fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world,’” the German intellectual told a Munich audience in 1917. Yet, if Weber could have returned to New York immediately following World War I, Butler surmised, it is likely he would have been “fascinated by the ways institutionalized religion and modernizing religious institutions thrived in this capital of American secularism.”Footnote ¹¹

Butler certainly had a right to critique students of the modern city in such a manner, yet ironically, at the very moment he was delivering his presidential speech, the audience that sat before him was more welcoming of faith than any OAH crowd had ever been. Had he been able to take full stock of the profession and religion’s place in it circa 2016—with the added benefit of hindsight from today—he too might have been fascinated by the way the sacred had, in a relatively short amount of time, penetrated bastions of the secular academy and “re-enchanted” scholarship on contemporary America. In fact, one might now look back at Butler’s OAH address as the capstone of a scholarly movement that had made swift strides toward eradication of the “religion problem” he had alerted his colleagues to in the previous decade.

Even a cursory glance suggests that the dozen years that spanned Butler’s 2004 and 2016 entreaties witnessed a surge in the study of religion that would reshape the profession. At this juncture, specialists in religion were busy reorienting various subfields of U.S. history by parsing out the abiding connections between institutions of faith and functions of civil society and the state, theology and wider intellectual and cultural drifts, biblical injunctions animating the pulpit and pew, and grassroots political directives for action on environment, economics, and geopolitics. For their part, non-religious historians seemed welcoming of such efforts and willing to do their part to center faith in core narratives. By the time Butler celebrated his OAH presidency, historians had prodded religion into conversations about major trends in U.S. history, the byproducts of which were evidenced in subfields like diplomatic, intellectual, immigration, labor, and women’s history, all fodder for rumination by experts in this forum. By 2016, several historians of religion had drafted historiographical essays that documented the flourish of activity in the field—that pondered (as intellectual historian Raymond Haberski mused) “Why Academia Found God.” This even as they highlighted emerging challenges with the genre—how to define an increasingly capacious term like “religion,” capture essential takeaways of a sprawling literature, and bridge divides between religious-studies and historical methodologies—and bemoaned the fact that despite the progress, religion was still largely absent in the “mainstream” literature. As many of these state-of-the-field articles emphasized, the challenges for religious historians were of a slightly different order compared to those that vexed them in 2004: as in American society, so in the academy, religion seemed to be everywhere, yet with what substantive effect?Footnote ¹²

Data certainly backs up the claim that religion was, by then, enjoying new heights (a “tsunami,” in Haberski’s words) of professional influence. Robert Townsend’s oft-cited 2009 report for the American Historical Association (AHA), aptly titled “A New Found Religion? The Field Surges Among AHA Members,” supplied an exclamation point of sorts for those pondering religious history’s ascent. Townsend noted that “specialists in religious history recently surpassed all other topical categories in our annual look at AHA members,” with 7.7 percent of AHA membership selecting religion as one of their core areas of interest. Sitting second was cultural history, practiced by 7.5 percent of the AHA body—a startling slide considering its fifteen-year reign as the most popular subfield. Equally striking were job stats and demographics: while 10 percent of jobs and fellowships advertised in the AHA’s Perspectives on History for 2008 mentioned the history of religion as a specialization of interest, a survey of departmental faculty listings found that assistant and associate professors were most likely to cite religion as one of their scholarly foci. Religious history, it seemed, had a bright future.Footnote ¹³

As evidenced in informal surveys of other data points from the period, the uptick of interest in religion that Townsend wrote about in 2009 was no mirage. Consider publishing trends. Journals geared to religious history such as Church History and Religion and American Culture continued to churn out articles based on the innovative research of emerging scholars, and in the process, expand their purview to include wider swaths of religious movements and experiences. While topics related to evangelicalism earned considerable attention during this time (owing to fresh interest in conservatism writ large), thanks in no small part to the influential scholarship of specialists from other fields including David Hollinger, Andrew Preston, and Michael Kazin (to name a few), liberal Protestantism enjoyed a new day in the sun as well. So too did topics related to ecumenism and the impact of Catholicism, Judaism, Mormonism, and spirituality on modern American development. By the mid-2010s, articles probing religion “AND” capitalism, empire, race, gender, politics, and law were staples in the religious history press, marking a trend among younger scholars especially to test the boundaries of their craft.Footnote ¹⁴

Meanwhile, other non-religion journals were following suit in carving out space for matters of faith. A random (nonscientific) sampling shows that between 2004 and 2016, journals such as Pacific Historical Review, Modern Intellectual History, Diplomatic History, the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Policy History, and Labor History exhibited spikes in religious-themed articles and book reviews, with concentrated growth in the 2010s. During this decade, Reviews in American History (RAH) increased the pages allotted each annual cycle to books about religion; whereas in 2007, RAH published no religious-themed book reviews, in 2016, it published four, and in 2019, six, marking a pattern of heightened exposure for religious history within the journal’s selective handling of manifold subfields. Ahead of RAH in anticipating the curve, in 2007, American Quarterly, the flagship journal for American Studies, produced a hefty, groundbreaking special issue on religion and politics, edited by leading religion scholars Marie Griffith and Melani McAlister. Johns Hopkins University Press published the special issue as a stand-alone volume in 2008.Footnote ¹⁵

It is little surprise that book publishing and conference programming mirrored the trend. While mainstay university presses like Oxford, Harvard, and Princeton ramped up production of texts geared to their extant strengths in religious history, upstart series with a non-religious focus made room for faith as well. Among them was the University of Pennsylvania Press’s “Politics and Culture in Modern America,” managed by Robert Lockhart, who recognized earlier than most editors outside religious studies that religion was on the rise. At virtually the same time Butler’s 2004 article appeared, Lockhart determined (with encouragement from Michael Kazin) that he could harness books about politics and religion to gain a foothold in the highly competitive arena of political history. Two decades later, Lockhart and the series’ foothold in the business is as strong as ever, thanks in no small part to their consistent efforts to produce first-rate books that place religion at the heart of the story of modern U.S. political history.Footnote ¹⁶

Lockhart recruited authors of these books via active engagement at U.S. history’s largest conferences, including annual meetings of the AHA and OAH. He was wise to do so, as these were venues where embryonic book projects were first teased and tested with future publication in mind. A perusal of OAH programs between 2005 and 2016 reveals a post-“Jack-in-the-Box Faith” boom in the number of panels dealing with religion, with standout years in 2007 (thirteen panels), 2014 (twelve panels), and 2016, the year of Butler’s OAH presidential address, which featured twelve panels. In 2016, OAH conferees had a smorgasbord of religious scholarship to sample that included sessions on missionary “boomerang” politics and Black religion and media, women missionary diplomacy and church-state pedagogy in the classroom, nonviolence and religious biography. Packing the room was a critics-meet-author panel on Kevin Kruse’s One Nation Under God. Kruse’s was one of several contemporary, noteworthy texts by historians with stellar reputations in adjacent fields (Andrew Preston’s Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith and Bethany Moreton’s To Serve God and Wal-Mart come to mind) that signaled religious history’s new status.Footnote ¹⁷

Those in attendance at Kruse’s panel were likely familiar with the book that won the OAH’s David Montgomery Award (best book in labor history) that year: Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf’s Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie. Though notable for the Fones-Wolfs, their award was part of a commonplace routine during the late 2000s and 2010s that saw the organization regularly hand out major prizes and honorable mentions to religion-themed books. The aforementioned To Serve God and Wal-Mart won the OAH’s best first book prize (Frederick Jackson Turner Award) in 2010, setting a standard for other “young” authors in the genre, including David Sehat, whose The Myth of Religious Freedom earned the recognition in 2012. Meanwhile, religious-themed books (and dissertations) captured prizes in several other major organizations, including the AHA, Southern Historical Association, and Society of American Historians. They won Bancroft prizes as well.Footnote ¹⁸

That these various guilds regularly celebrated religion-themed books in such fashion is hardly surprising considering the sheer volume of texts they had to choose from circa 2016. By 2015, Baylor University Ph.D. student Paul Putz was regularly posting annotated bibliographies of forthcoming books on religion at the Religion in American History (RiAH) blog that included dozens (and dozens!) of entries, signaling what was by then well known: that over the course of a few decades, the number of U.S. religious history books published annually had grown exponentially. (Specifically, between 1995 and 2015, the number of copyrighted books about religion quadrupled.) The RiAH blog was itself proof of the rising tide: launched by religious historians Paul Harvey and Kelly Baker in 2007, by 2013 the blog was viewed by roughly 50,000 people monthly; by 2016, that number had grown exponentionally to 165,000. Those who frequented the site did so from all corners of North America, Europe, South America, and Asia—eager always to digest reviews of the latest books in the field (helped by Putz, in this regard), read posts about religion in history and contemporary times, and debate new directions for the growing community.Footnote ¹⁹

The deluge of interest in religious history during the 2004–2016 stretch was not just a product of the pen (and worldwide web); it was generated by significant infrastructural gains as well. Book prizes, conference panels, journal publishing trends: religious history’s momentum was helped along by a steadily expanding apparatus of academic programs, centers, and initiatives devoted to the study of religion. Students and adherents of “major” faiths in the United States, it seemed, were anxious to enter the business of institution building, with newly funded chairs and centers of Mormon Studies (one of the earliest being Claremont Graduate University’s Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies, established in 2008, and first held by the esteemed scholar of American religion Richard Bushman) joining extant and expanding centers of study on Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish traditions. Such programmatic ambition cut across denominational and disciplinary lines as well, all thanks to increased attention from several philanthropic foundations with deep pockets and a soft spot for faith. The Duke Endowment, Danforth Foundation, Pew Charitable Trust, Templeton Foundation, Lilly Endowment: these and other agencies approached the late 2000s and 2010s with a commitment and capacity to fundamentally shape the study of religion—and religion itself—in modern America.Footnote ²⁰

The Midwest was home to much of the action, illustrated by momentous happenings in St. Louis. With an initial $30-million endowment gift from the Danforth Foundation, Washington University in St. Louis created in 2010 the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics as a “center of scholarly excellence and public engagement with issues of critical importance in American Life.” Headed by Marie Griffith, framed in the spirit of ecumenism that Republican Senator John C. Danforth promoted, the center would quickly grow into the busy hub it is today for scholarship and public-facing engagement on matters both of historical and contemporary importance.Footnote ²¹

Despite the Danforth Center’s notable generosity, as far as philanthropy for the study of religion (and Midwestern resolve) were concerned, no one entity could match the Lilly Endowment, founded by J.K. Lilly Sr. and his sons, Eli and J.K. Jr., as the benevolent arm of Eli Lilly and Company based in Indianapolis, Indiana. In the decades after World War II, the mid-sized Lilly Endowment carved out a niche among its larger peers as a foundation focused on matters of faith, as they concerned churches and local communities, scholars and the academy, and especially as they impacted the region it called home. As historian Philip Byers writes, over its “first four decades of earnest organized giving, Lilly Endowment’s leaders earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars for investment in the nation’s religious communities,” leaving very few forums for religious practice and study untouched. From the financing of pastoral ministries to “periodicals through which religious actors dialogued,” construction and maintenance of religious edifices to sponsorship of programs that convened people and students of faith, Lilly’s was a concerted effort to shape the late-twentieth-century American approach to the sacred. Well into the twenty-first century, to the present day, the academy would continue to feel the effects.Footnote ²²

Within the Lilly orb of religion-focused academic programming, it is safe to say that no entity has been more impressive than the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture (CSRAC), based at Indiana University Indianapolis. Established in 1989 “to explore the connections between religion and other aspects of American culture,” CSRAC had a productive decade before the new millennium, thanks in no small part to Pew’s fiscal help. In 2002, however, it took a leap forward when Lilly pledged even more substantial funds. Under the guidance of religious historian Philip Goff, whose executive directorship is now twenty-five years running, the center approached 2004, the year Butler’s “Jack-in-the-Box Faith” was released, primed to become the “definitive center for the study of religion and American culture,” “premier research and publishing teaching institute of its kind,” and essentially ground zero for tackling the “religion problem” head on.Footnote ²³

If not deliberately in response to Butler’s article, CSRAC certainly proceeded swiftly, with Lilly cash in hand, to construct an apparatus of scholarly outreach that included a prime journal in the field (Religion and American Culture), a Biennial Conference, drawing religion scholars to Indianapolis to reflect on and debate the state of their craft (culminating in publication of the proceedings), and the Young Scholars in American Religion (YSAR) program, geared to mentorship of early-career faculty by senior-level counterparts.

As impactful as each CSRAC program has been on the study of religion in our time (it is hard to overstate the center’s overall reach, or identify fair comparisons in other disciplinary contexts), no one initiative has been more crucial than YSAR. Between 2004 and 2024, thirteen cohorts, each comprising two mentors and ten participants, roughly 140 “young” scholars total, spent the requisite two years gathering biannually with their peers to learn how to teach better, write better, and lead with effect both inside the guild and beyond. These rising practitioners of the trade came from a host of home faculties, the most prominent religious studies and history, followed by sociology, American Studies, and a handful of others. They also came with doctorates in hand from a host of Ph.D.-granting universities—roughly forty-five total, stretching from Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia on the east coast to Stanford and the University of California system on the west coast, from established private universities like Rice, Emory, Notre Dame, and Duke to the major state schools of the South and Midwest. Goff and his team might have been guilty of dreaming big at the outset of the Lilly dispensation in 2004, yet with the chance to look back where YSAR’s legacy is concerned, it appears such lofty aspirations were warranted. The program’s 140 alums (plus its former mentors and newest cohorts) have published a mass of articles and award-winning books in their subgenres that have provided much intellectual energy and glue for the study of religion in U.S. history. Less conspicuous is the extent to which they have assumed outsized roles in administration, as deans and provosts, departmental chairs, center and institute directors, journal editors, and board members and presidents of various academic societies. Besides supplying the ideas around which much recent U.S. (not just religious) history has cohered, YSAR alums have also helped guarantee that the machinery for study of history with faith factored in has stayed well-oiled and robust.Footnote ²⁴

As the success of YSAR and the entire CSRAC operation testify, by the late 2010s, backed by philanthropy and a dawning recognition in some corners of the academy that “religion matters,” the study of the phenomenon became a sort of phenomenon in its own right. Earlier in his career, Butler published his ground-breaking book, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People, which impelled historians to look beyond Puritan-dominated narratives to recognize the remarkably diverse, “complex and bumptious” spiritual hothouse that was American society between the early seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. By the late 2010s, the same could be said about the academic profession, the guild of history especially, as it nurtured its own awakening of sorts.Footnote ²⁵

But as any scholar of American religion knows, awakenings are tempestuous and temporary things, often followed (in the eyes of their ardent champions, at least) by letdown and looming prospects of declension. Butler himself exhibited a type of post-revival hesitancy in his 2016 OAH speech, in which he acknowledged recent progress where the religion question in the historical discipline was concerned, but also expressed concern that some jack-in-the-box trends and remnants of Weberian theory endured. Four years later, in 2020, he published God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan. The culmination of years of research, Butler’s text once again reflected his longstanding quest to explode myths about secularism in modern America. In New York, an imagined capital of secular ways, faith in fact adapted, thrived, and penetrated daily life. Gotham was no godless place, something he wished colleagues in urban history would appreciate by looking beyond its material grids. Sixteen years after issuing his charge for historians to solve the religion problem, he intimated that the pop-up trend continued.Footnote ²⁶

So it is that, after an initial twelve-year burst of energy in response to Butler’s “Jack-in-the-Box Faith,” momentum seemed to wane, leaving students of religion struggling again to gain a hearing with their peers. It is easy in U.S. history circles—not just church pulpits and pews—to overstate rise-and-fall patterns in modern life, necessitating caution when measuring any spirit of the age is required.

Yet, a random (nonscientific) survey of conference and publishing trends does indeed suggest that something changed circa 2016. Whereas the 2016 OAH Annual Meeting witnessed a high point of religion-themed panels, the 2017 gathering saw a 75-percent reduction with only three such slots. From 2017 to 2022, religious history panels continued to hover in the handful range, with only one making an appearance on the 2022 docket. Major university presses continued to churn out books about religion and its intersections with wider historical trends, but journal publishing followed patterns in conferencing. In key periodicals such as the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Pacific Historical Review, and the Journal of Policy History, spikes in the production of religious-themed articles in the mid-2010s were followed by steep drop-offs. Reviews in American History did not lose interest in religion entirely; in fact, rising interest continued into 2019 when the journal’s review articles covered at least ten books about religion, but by 2020 and 2021 that number fell rather precipitously to pre-2016 totals (four per year). The journal of Modern Intellectual History abandoned religion altogether in 2018 and 2019, before welcoming it back in the 2020 issues. Meanwhile, even the go-to online source for all things religion and history—Harvey and Baker’s Religion in American History blog—entered an epoch of stasis, with traffic heavily subsiding by the 2020s.Footnote ²⁷

Here too it would be misguided to make too much of these cursory hints of decline, as other publishing trends seemed to underscore religion’s hold on the profession. Consider Diplomatic History, for instance, and the steady interest in religion shown by those affiliated with its parent organization, the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). From 2011 to the present day, religion has remained a red-hot topic for articles and reviews. Meanwhile, some of the most important books in the areas of foreign policy and “U.S. in the world” history have been produced by SHAFR scholars whose ongoing study of missionaries and religious nonprofits, faith-based institutions, and faith-friendly state agents have profoundly shaped our understandings of post-1890s American international advances. Testifying to this ongoing concern with the god factor is John Corrigan, Melani McAlister, and Axel R. Schäfer’s recent edited volume, Global Faith, Worldly Power: Evangelical Internationalism and U.S. Empire. One need not look any further than their sparkling, exhaustive introduction to appreciate the breadth of recent scholarship on religion and U.S. international relations, and the general flourishing of the field.Footnote ²⁸

Meanwhile, booming interest in another facet of evangelicalism’s (very) recent past further challenges the notion that the religion problem returned after 2016. Donald Trump’s presidency positioned evangelicalism at center stage in the nation’s political re-composition, and in the process triggered a new genus of “Trump Studies.” Amid the fallout of the 2016 presidential election, when pollsters revealed that 81 percent of American evangelicals had voted for Trump, thus anchoring his base, evangelicalism’s dissenting voices—the constituency’s 19-percent non-Trump crowd—joined a wider axis of skeptics to question (censure) Bible believers in the MAGA (Make America Great Again) camp. What did the category “evangelical” mean theologically if it was mere cover for base politics, they asked. How could converted Christians justify support for a candidate who seemed resistant (even opposed) to their core values? Besides generating heated arguments within evangelical circles, the literature that re-evaluated the subculture’s contemporary politics in a fresh read of its history also helped shape broader discussions about white Christian nationalism and the rise of the domestic and global far right. It turns out Butler’s gaze on Gotham was justified, not least because of its role in enabling the rise of a populist politician (for many evangelicals, a prophet-king), a new niche for the city’s publishing empires, and renewed debates among scholars across disciplinary boundaries about the composition, high stakes, and staying power of the ramped-up culture wars.Footnote ²⁹

Yet for all of religion’s gains in some sectors of academic and popular history, its fate in modern U.S. history circles remains murkier. It is beyond the purview (and page limit) of this brief, high-altitude introduction to probe the factors and reasons behind what might most fairly be described as the plateauing of religion in the broader profession. One can make quick guesses why: declining interest in the humanities generally; COVID and global economic and geopolitical upheaval; pressing worries about climate change, civil rights, immigration, and the reach of the carceral and surveilling state—there is no shortage of external forces as of late that have made religion just one of many urgent demands on the modern mind and collective soul. And within any academic guild, of course, shifting courses is the norm. Whereas religion rode a wave in the early 2010s, other subfields, such as those attuned to the starkest conditions of our time (histories of capitalism, incarceration, environment, immigration, and the far right, to name a few), have captured the imagination of history’s rising cohort. While Trump’s stay in the White House, coupled with related developments in the Middle East, have generated much-needed revised study of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish conservatism in recent U.S. history, it has also placed new blinders on the craft. Once again, it seems—perhaps justifiably so, religion has popped up “big-league,” in Trump parlance, and is scaring people in singularly ominous terms.

Other guesses as to why the pace of American religious history’s ascent has changed since 2016, leaving historians pondering in Butler’s mode again, have to do with shifting priorities within the study of religion itself. As John McGreevy noted when offering his state of the union take on U.S. religious history circa 2011, if there were challenges under its broad canopy, a shortage of scholarship was not it. Quite the opposite, amid the burst of attention on religion, the “sheer sprawl of the field” had led to an abundance of production but reduction in clarity—a drive for more without sufficient pause for critical questioning and debates about how religion actually mattered in shaping farther-reaching swaths of national (and global) change. McGreevy also highlighted methodological tensions that placed religious studies and history specialists in different camps, with the former focused on questions of interiority (what is religion and the natures of religious experience), the latter on exteriority (what does religion do and how does it operate in societal contexts over time). Since 2011, 2016 certainly, it is safe to surmise that this bifurcation has sharpened, with religious studies experts calling for more theoretical precision on the part of their history colleagues, and historians urging their peers to keep religion’s functions in society front and center. Even with the expanding apparatus of religion-related scholarly networks, it has been quite easy for these two sides to gather separately, with one circling the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting as the must on their calendars, the other the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (where loosely affiliated organizations such as the American Society of Church History and American Catholic Historical Association also gather). The exception has been the Biennial Conference, hosted by the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture, where scholars of religion from across disciplines gather to compare notes as well as prod one another to approach their tasks differently. As the CSRAC’s published Biennial reports reveal, the prodding can be intense, but highly generative as well. At very least, the interdisciplinary meetings have made talking past one another more difficult, siloed scholarship less desirable.Footnote ³⁰

Still, even with these points of contact—maybe in part because of them—methodological frustrations among different practicing camps of religious history have continued to agitate the field, and in some ways render the jack-in-the-box religion problem less pressing, less determinable. Whose “religion” are we talking about, detractors ask, and how is adding more proof to the picture of it “doing stuff” in history actually helpful? Especially when the substance of it is murky too—indeed, how does one actually know what religion is, and by extension, what the “secular” is? Is the critique of the pop-up phenomenon inherent in historiography not clouded by a Protestant conceit about the workings of sacred and secular in western society—a conceit not so out of step with the very sociologists, Weber et al., who predicted religion’s inevitable decline? These and other doubts, surfacing from religious studies contexts especially, have to a degree blunted the command for religious historians to charge forward and fill gaps and bibliographies in modern U.S. history with their texts.

Such questions (and several others) are at the heart of Kathryn Lofton’s far-ranging and essential 2019 think piece in this journal, which gets at the tensions in the study of religious history, and the core query, signaled in its title, of “Why Religion is Hard for Historians (and How it Can be Easier).” For Lofton, who occupies a position at Yale once held by Butler, the discipline of history is itself shot through with debilitating prejudices where the religious is concerned. On one hand, historians have been programmed to think that they can find religion through basic application of their method: that through deep dives into archival records of beliefs, practices, and institutions of faith, the historian is able to decipher and catalog its workings across time. “Good” religious history is, accordingly, that which charts such otherworldly concerns and the worldly structures of authority that buttress them in ever-widening contexts of societal encounter. For Lofton, historians’ confidence that “religion is an object everybody can find without much confusion,” (if it looks and smells like religion, it is religion, the saying goes) smacks not just of arrogance but of sheltered thinking. “Whatever else historians do with religion, they ought to begin discussing it with a little less confidence that they know it when they see it,” she asserts, including—certainly—as it pertains to anything defined as “belief,” a construct of hegemonic Christianity. “When historians look for belief, they collude with this political power,” she adds with emphasis.Footnote ³¹

Lofton criticizes another fundamental assumption of the discipline, which it shares with the social sciences, derived from the Enlightenment, that sees academic history as the counterweight—the antidote—to “unreasonable beliefs,” to religion as a whole. “Religion was the disease that secular history was born to heal,” she prods. By explaining the material and political interests behind theology, the “strategies of social control” that fueled “fables of human folly” and fantasies of the afterlife, and “how magical ceremonies were strategies of epistemological control,” historians thought they would also provide sufficient evidence to convince readers to “give up their unreasonable beliefs.” History was a secular project from the get-go, its specialists commissioned to historicize the supernatural out of chronicles of human time, and in no small part, to expurgate religion from the modern mind. So why pretend otherwise and protest the lack of the sacred in academic history? Why continue to lament dominant tendencies among peers to write faith out of the picture of modern American development? Lofton’s trenchant appraisal is a useful reminder that the jack-in-the-box trend in modern U.S. historiography is far less a surprising corruption than a natural extension of the profession’s founding mandate.Footnote ³²

In her diagnosis of the problem, and remedial calls for historians to be more attentive to the contingencies and fluidities of the categories they deem religious, more self-reflective and self-critical of their discipline’s built-in prejudices, and more open to “anthropologically realized” frameworks for grappling with relationships, fields, and discourses of power that have always set the parameters of “religion,” Lofton may differ slightly in pitch and emphasis from her predecessor. Yet for Lofton and Butler alike, the overriding charge is the same—for students of religion to continue the hard work of excavating the complex, tangled processes by which human beings come to understand their worlds in otherworldly terms. The eight essays that follow, authored by scholars working at the intersections of religious studies and history, religious history and adjacent subfields, explore the manifest ways such processes have played out on a variety (limited, to be sure) of historical and historiographical grids. They also proceed with more straightforward directives in mind, with Butler’s 2004 essay serving as the primary inspiration: to ponder the endurance (or disappearance) of jack-in-the-box faith, to chart recent progressions, and to anticipate new directions in their areas of specialization. Butler concludes the panel with generous reflections of his own that include the backstory to the inclusion of a pop-up clown in his scholarship, and a forward-looking glimpse at where religious history—religion itself—may go next in our moment of stark transformation.Footnote ³³