Thinking about pluralism in the context of the study of American religion is complicated. As Martin E. Marty illustrates in the foreword to this volume, ‘diversity’ is a fact of religion in America (and in the greatest possible historical sense – we can talk about the diversity of Native American religious practices prior to European conquest before we even get to the collision of native, African and European traditions in the New World). ‘Pluralism’, however, is an attitude, a prescribed way of dealing with the fact of diversity – generally speaking, an approach emphasising constructive and mutually accepting engagement. Studies of pluralism often conflate these two ideas, but it is important to keep them distinct both at the level of the object of study (is a given study elaborating on the fact of diversity or the practice of pluralism?) as well as at the level of scholarly production: studies of pluralism are often uncritical promotions of pluralism, and, fine as a goal as pluralism may be, in scholarship prescription occludes. As Marie Griffith observes, with particular reference to religious pluralism and women's history, in one of this volume's outstanding essays, ‘[T]he need to find happy stories of pluralistic partnerships across religious differences could mean that we miss other modes of engagement between women of diverse religious traditions’ (p. 254).

This edited volume, which grew out of a 2007 conference on ‘Religious Pluralism in Modern America’ at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, brings together fifteen essays covering various aspects of diversity and pluralism in recent American history. The distinctions between diversity and pluralism, study and promotion, are not clearly maintained in all of them, but most of these essays are self-conscious and perceptive discussions of pluralism and/or diversity. In addition to treating the question of pluralism in American religion in a way that will help scholars contextualise and frame their work within the field, this is an accessible, teachable collection that would be a fruitful addition to any course on religion in contemporary America.

The list of contributors here is impressive – in addition to Marty and Griffith, there are essays from Deborah Dash Moore, Thomas Tweed, the late Paul Boyer, and a host of other luminaries in the study of religion in America. Amanda Porterfield's opening entry is the collection's most sustained reflection on pluralism as an interpretive concept, and it should be required reading for graduate students in American religious history. Porterfield places aesthetic presentations of religious difference that emphasise unity and shared spirit at the origins of the study of religion in America. She finds ‘pluralism’ in this sense to be a term often beholden to idealistic thinking about both America and religion. ‘Implying that religion is common ground in a shared democratic culture, people who use the term often convey idealism about democracy, and about religion's role in upholding it’, she writes (p. 21). Such approaches may be pedagogically useful for cultivating an important open-mindedness among students, but Porterfield observes that ‘religious pluralism operates to some extent like a religion itself, a conceptual framework of interpretation that rests in a universal and finally mystical understanding of religion and its essential importance for human existence’ (p. 22). Positioning Sydney Ahlstrom's monumental A religious history of the American people (1972) as the framing narrative about pluralism and democracy within which many later scholars have operated, she goes on to discuss important studies of American religion with respect to this idealism, juxtaposing Diana Eck's optimism, for example, with the very different sorts of scepticism about pluralism evinced by D. G. Hart and Russell McCutcheon.

Yvonne Haddad's entry on ‘Muslims and American religious pluralism’ is a particularly important entry for Americanists in that it provides some much needed discussion of pluralistic thinking within, rather than merely about, Islam in America. In the context of the Cold War, the Iranian Revolution and 9/11, Haddad writes, Muslim intellectuals have turned to ‘theological constructs of the meaning of certain Qur'anic verses and cultural norms’ to elaborate not just a ground for Islam's engagement with pluralistic society, but also to argue for the ‘necessity of developing pluralism in the Muslim community itself’ (pp. 168, 187). This discourse, she argues, is directed both inward – as a call for Muslims ‘to celebrate their internal differences’ – and outward. The articulation of differences among Muslims serves as an inoculation against ‘Western charges that Islam advocates holy war, jihad against non-Muslims, and has legislated the subjugation of women and minorities’ (p. 169). Haddad's brief but fine-grained analysis grants American Muslims the complexity and agency often missing from pluralist studies of religion in post 9/11 America.

Several other essays here are essential contributions: Bret Carroll's analysis of the spatial and geographic terms of pluralism in America moves from a discussion of the controversy over the ‘Ground Zero mosque’ to a broader discussion of pluralism's ‘locationally specific forms’ (p. 89); Griffith's is a nuanced examination of the ways in which gender has served women as the grounds for both pluralistic models of religious cooperation and abrasive critiques of religions regarded as foreign; Boyer's essay provides an historically-conscious overview of American exceptionalism's recent religiously-inflected iterations. Pluralism and diversity – carefully enumerated or clumsily combined – will continue to be a feature of both religion in America and the study of religion in America, and the essays collected here provide an essential road map for approaching both.