| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal. By William R. Hutchison. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. xii, 276 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-300-09813-8.)
This elegantly written book constitutes William R. Hutchison's contribution to a conversation among specialists in U.S. religion. What general interpretive frameworks make the best sense of the variety of religious practices treated by the field? Hutchison comments that some scholars are so intent to map diversity that they remind him of scholars who survey politics without attending to Democrats and Republicans. In contrast, his interpretation centers on the Protestant establishment and its response to Catholic and Jewish immigration from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s.	1
The key limitation of this approach is that Hutchison does not foreground race and gender, nor outsiders who thrive by defining themselves against the establishment (as in R. Laurence Moore's approach). In Hutchison's model, Protestant insiders begin from a baseline of dominance in the early 1800s and then move through a series of shocks to this system. He emphasizes Catholic immigration before 1850, arguing that its proportional impact was greater than that of subsequent changes. Then he continues with treatments of later immigration, the rise of industrial cities, and other challenges to the status quo.	. . .

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