This volume takes its place alongside a number of recent books that have reassessed Christianity in the United States. Rather than viewing Protestantism as a continuous mainstream tradition, the editors of Practicing Protestants see it as a diffuse set of ideas and practices that evoke “movement, encounter, and transformation” (15). The book is the fruit of the History of American Christian Practice Project seminars that began in 2002 to facilitate discussion between historians of religion, theologians and pastors, culminating in a University of North Carolina conference in October 2004. As such, it arises from the same moment as Hugo Heclo and Wilfred McClay's volume Religion Returns to the Public Square (2003) in engaging with the public dimension of religion at a time that E. J. Dionne Jr has called this “new stage in our great national debate over religious liberty.”

While Practicing Protestants deals with developments in the religious marketplace over three hundred years, its primary aim is to examine the various forms of American Christian practice from the Puritans to the mid-twentieth century. The editors frame the collection of twelve essays by taking a “mediating stance” (6) between two rival views of practice: on one hand the social theorists Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau and Catherine Bell who see religious practice as a form of social discipline implicating power relations, and on the other contemporary theologians Dorothy Bass, Craig Dykstra and Stephanie Paulsell who view practice as the embodiment of virtue and faith in their attempts to “recover and encourage more meaningful processes of spiritual formation” (4).

The volume is divided into four parts, each dealing with a specific turning point in Christian practice: the first (and shortest) part covering 1630 to 1800 considers the challenge of the Enlightenment to Puritan practice; the second section, “Mission, Nation and Christian Practice, 1820–1940,” deals with colonization, including two very interesting essays on rival Christian encounters in Hawaii and on Ojibwe Christianity; the third section examines such late nineteenth-century “devotional practices” as faith healing and prayer in the face of modernization; and the last part considers the challenge of twentieth-century pluralism, engaging with the cultural sphere directly through secular practices of dance and art. It is a shame there is no fifth section dealing with recent Protestant practices that have variously threatened and bolstered Christianity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Nevertheless, as an exercise in religious and historical retrieval, this is an engaging collection on the phenomenology of Christian practice.