| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 218 words from this article are provided below; about 402 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Divine Hierarchies: Class in American Religion and Religious Studies. By Sean McCloud. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xii, 224 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 978-0-8078-3160-1. Paper, $22.50, ISBN 978-0-8078-5849-3.)
If race, class, and gender form the proverbial holy trinity of contemporary academic studies in the humanities, the son of that trinity—class—has been orphaned sometimes in recent American religious history. Race has been central to scholarly work, and gender also animates much recent scholarship. Class, on the other hand, suffers from relative abandonment in the discussion of recent American religious historiography. Divine Hierarchies is not the foundational work needed, nor is it intended as such. Rather, Sean McCloud aims to re-open the conversation about how and why class matters in American religion.	1
McCloud opens with a Pierre Bourdieu–influenced analysis of what "class" is. Not reducible to "class consciousness," nor "just a status grounded in material conditions," or the "sole, deterministic basis" of behavior, class is, in McCloud's usage, both an "externally ascribed status" as well as a half-chosen identity: "Class is about classification, representation, and the availability and constraint particular material conditions promote" (p. 29). Class is part of our "socially habituated subjectivity," reaching far beyond income and working occupation into our modes of speech, dress, foodways, and religious psychology (p. 28).	. . .

There are about 402 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.