Most books on heaven have fallen into one of three categories. There have been testimonies by believers, from the visions of Emanuel Swedenborg in the eighteenth century to recent accounts of return from near death. There have been works by theologians seeking the truth from scriptures, reason, and tradition. Then there have been works of history, most of which take no position on the truth but describe and analyze what believers and theologians have said.

Gary Scott Smith's Heaven in the American Imagination belongs to a newer genre, as a book by an historian of religion who is interested both in how concepts of heaven have changed and in how those changes relate to theological truth. It is not the first book of this kind. Jeffrey Burton Russell's Paradise Mislaid: How We Lost Heaven—and How We Can Regain It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) explicitly avowed this aim, and my own American Angels: Useful Spirits in the Material World (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007) also mixed history with theology. Russell and I stood outside our stories and picked some favorite tendencies to advocate. Smith offers an insider's version of history plus theology. He stands within his story, both as an evangelical and as an American.

For example, Smith identifies with the Puritans of his first chapter. While acknowledging such Puritan faults as “an overly stringent legal system,” he insists that “few groups in history can match their theological understanding” (11). When he concludes that the Puritans conceived heaven as “a loving community of like-minded saints who espoused a shared ideology” (28), the reader can feel Smith's approval.

A thesis that Americans have imagined heaven in ways that reflect their lives on earth informs this book. Chapters proceed through a standard account of American religious history, from the Puritans to the First Great Awakening, the Revolutionary era, the Second Great Awakening, the Victorian Era, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Progressive years, the mid-twentieth century, the aftermath of the 1960s, and the Postmodern world since the millennium. Smith demonstrates that concepts of heaven have mirrored the other emphases of theology, which in turn reflected social conditions. During the disorderly revivals called the Great Awakenings, for example, preachers stressed the need for rebirth to enter heaven and a theocentric, orderly vision of heavenly life. Slaves expected freedom in heaven; Victorians like Elizabeth Stuart Phelps found better versions of their homes and domestic lives; and Progressives saw heaven as a world of workers helping God to improve the world. In the last two decades, Americans from a therapeutic culture that stresses happiness have imagined people in heaven coming to understand their earthly lives, reconciling with people from the past, and enjoying a supernatural resort with all their loved ones, including pets.

While guiding the reader through these changes, Smith focuses on what evangelical Protestants have said, marginally including some Catholics, Mormons, liberal Protestants, and Jews. Smith justifies his emphasis by asserting that “Protestant evangelicals have been the largest and most influential group throughout our history” (viii). He maintains a sense that, despite the variety of images of heaven in American history, American discourse about heaven has centered on the Bible and a few fundamental questions, such as the role of faith and works in attaining salvation, the issue of whether people can attain heaven through spiritual progress after death, and the prospect of universal salvation.

Smith makes a few questionable but provocative judgments. During the Civil War, he says, a fervent belief in heaven marked both armies, as evidenced in letters of the soldiers and in accounts of how soldiers died. This faith in heaven created “a cultural climate that made the slaughter of the Civil War possible,” Smith argues (99). Armed with “confidence that they would spend eternity with God and loved ones,” soldiers from North and South fought “fearlessly and furiously, contributing to the war's astounding death tolls” (99).

Sometimes, Smith's confidence that American religious discourse has a visible center leads him to group together people who would be separated by other historians. Discussing the Revolutionary generation, he lists Thomas Jefferson and John Adams together among “theistic rationalists” who all “saw the Bible as divinely inspired,” despite the fact that Jefferson edited his own New Testament. He also includes Charles Carroll, the sole Roman Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, alongside the Presbyterian minister John Witherspoon and the Quaker physician Benjamin Rush, on a list of “orthodox Christians” who signed the Declaration. Unlike many scholars and believers, Smith does not differentiate on denominational lines.

One apparent misstep relates to Smith's commitment to an American center. While discussing the therapeutic heaven of the twenty-first century, Smith makes an assertion that may be true but that seems unprovable: “more than the people of any other nation, Americans eagerly and anxiously pursue happiness” (214). An endnote leads to page 473 of Happiness: A History, by Darrin M. McMahon (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), but that page contains no stronger proof than a list of American books with “happiness” in their titles.

A special version of American exceptionalism informs Heaven in the American Imagination. Behind Smith's ability to discuss such disparate events as Cardinal Avery Dulles criticizing belief in universal salvation and Michael Jackson's funeral on facing pages (222–223) lies the author's educational background, which leads him to use Dulles to implicitly critique the response to Jackson's death. After obtaining his bachelor's degree at Grove City College and going to Johns Hopkins for his doctorate, Smith returned to Grove City, where he now chairs the History department. Grove City College was founded in 1876, with a mission to spread Christianity (in an “orthodox” Presbyterian version) and free enterprise. On the last page of Heaven in the American Imagination, Smith concludes that American concepts of heaven have inspired Americans to fulfill “our calling to be light and salt and to spread Christianity, republicanism, and free enterprise to the world.”