A ‘turning points’ approach to history has become popular in recent years, and history teachers can choose from a wide array of offerings in both book and video formats. The American church historian, Mark Noll, used this approach to produce a widely adopted and emulated text for general church history, Turning points: decisive moments in the history of Christianity (1997; 4th edn 2022). Elesha Coffman, who teaches history at Baylor University, professes great admiration for this approach, and this is her application of it to American religious history.

A turning points approach has much to commend it. History survey texts tend to focus on coverage – of the salient events, people, places and institutions – then offer a few thematic threads to make a narrative line. Reading and extracting some meaning from such texts, however, can be a dull chore for students and a challenge to teachers who want to convey the drama, down-river effects and contemporary relevance of history. By selecting pivotal events, people and situations, a turning-points book can not only add interest and show how history matters, but it can also push students to think like historians. They focus attention on matters of interpretation, on seeing how people and situations shape the outcome and trendlines of events. Turning points naturally provoke questions and debate. They offer more depth of narrative, with more focus on the influence of individuals and groups, and on contingency: how things might have turned out differently.

One might well ask what constitutes a turning point. Generally, historians think of it as an occasion when some important and enduring change begins to happen within a historical narrative. In American history, for example, one might argue that Rosa Parks sitting down in the ‘whites only’ section of the city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on 1 December 1955, was a turning point in the civil rights movement. Coffman concedes that some of her selected turning points are more fresh beginnings than pivots, and she invites her readers to question the cases she has chosen. If you want to debate her choices, she argues, then you must do some historical thinking, and that’s all to the good.

It is usually bad form in a review of a multi-themed book like this one to engage all themes, but in this case, that is the best way to consider the worth of the book as a provocative teaching tool. So, with apologies:

1. 1. The defeat of the Spanish Armada, 1588. This event made possible the colonisation of North America by other Northern European powers, and especially for the English colonisers, it fortified the notion of a divine mandate. God was on their side.

2. 2. Roger Williams banished from Massachusetts, 1635. Even though they were dissenters, the Puritans in Massachusetts enforced conformity. Williams protested and was banished to Rhode Island, where America’s ‘lively experiment’ of religious freedom was born.

3. 3. King Philip’s war, 1675–6. Competition for land, cultural misunderstandings and murderous passions broke out early in British North America and has set the stage for settler-native relations. Churches partnered with government in attempts to evangelise and westernise Native Americans, and to this day they struggle to regain what was lost.

4. 4. George Whitefield sparks the First Great Awakening, 1740. Whitefield and the Wesleys preached in churches when invited, and outside when they were not. The pro-Awakening ‘evangelicals’, as Whitefield called them, stressed conversion and personal piety over sacraments and worship in established Churches. This portable, populist, personalised faith flourished in a mobile culture fixated on personal liberty.

5. 5. First African American Church founded at Silver Bluff, South Carolina, 1773. This Black church has persevered through many trials and tribulations and has become the pillar of Black communities. Today, African Americans are more likely to be church people than white Americans.

6. 6. John Carroll elected first Roman Catholic bishop in the United States, 1789. For the earliest Catholic leaders, the prime question was ‘What does it mean to be Catholic and American?’ The Church persevered through waves of immigration and saw its people become a potent labour and political force, but the question of being Catholic and American abides.

7. 7. American Bible Society founded, 1816. Non-ecclesiastical Christian agencies were a British invention, but in a liberal-democratic polity, these voluntary associations became the lifeblood of American social development and reform. Their missions, however, were often contested: was their purpose social uplift and reform, or social control?

8. 8. Methodist Church splits over slavery, 1844. Methodist rules forbade buying or selling slaves, but eventually the Church had to decide between moral consistency and church growth. The Methodists were the first of the major Protestant groups to split, North and South. Thereafter, Churches were aligned, and unable to take a prophetic stance over against the state. The rise of civil religion and Christian nationalism was the result.

9. 9. Student volunteer movement launched, 1886. As the US grew as a world power with overseas interests, student Christian movements turned their gaze toward witness abroad. Mainline Protestants came to doubt this mission, but conservative Protestant foreign missions continue unabated.

10. 10. Azusa Street revival catalyses Pentecostalism, 1906. This was part of a global revival, growing to become the second largest Christian tradition in the world. A current ‘third wave’ version focusing on healing, prosperity and ‘spiritual warfare’ is fuelling right wing, ‘culture wars’ politics today.

11. 11. The Scopes ‘monkey trial’, 1925. Darwin’s theory of evolution became an emblem of cultural conflict, raising questions about the accuracy and authority of the Bible. In America, legal disputes about its being taught in schools took the fundamentalist-modernist conflict out into the larger society. At stake was who, and what ideas, have authority. Scopes planted an enduring scepticism about science and scientific authority in the Evangelical community.

12. 12. Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, Birmingham, 1963. The bombing of a Black church deflated criticism of the civil rights movement and pushed the government to pass civil rights laws. Yet the opposing sides of human rights reform and conserving the status quo persist.

13. 13. Ronald Reagan elected president, 1980. Evangelical, ‘born-again’ Christianity gained national prominence in 1976 as two devout candidates, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, competed in the presidential election. Carter, the more liberal of the two, became president but Evangelicals shifted toward conservative politics, pushed by the rise of the feminist movement and the legalisation of abortion. As a result, American Evangelicalism has been redefined as a political entity, bringing the power struggles and polarisation of American politics into the American churches.

It probably would not take long for students and professors of American church history to debate Coffman’s turning points, and such debates enliven and improve church history. What is clear from her choices is that church history matters; its relevance for contemporary life and thought in America is abundantly clear. Some students might come away perplexed, seeing how fully debate, conflict and misbehaviour mark church history. Indeed, says Coffman, it used to be omitted from the curriculum of some seminaries because it was more unsettling than inspiring. But that is the burden of history: to make us aware of context, complexity and contingency, and to tell the truth about the past, even when the truth is hard to accept.