In recent years, thanks to growing appreciation for the global reach of Christianity and the tradition's stunning growth in the southern and eastern hemispheres, historians have begun to use the plural—Christianities—rather than the singular. The plural highlights the intricate ways a religion rooted in the ancient Near East has interacted with belief systems, practices, and ethnic heritages in multiple cultures in such ways that for all practical purposes several new religions emerged. All have ties to Christianity, but may have taken on such distinctive casts as to be distinct religions in their own right, not just variants of a single faith tradition.

The twenty-two essays and introduction comprising this volume represent an effort to extend that understanding to the United States, with editors and authors insisting that Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Latter-day Saints, to cite the most frequent examples used, represent different American Christianities. Some suggest that even the multitudinous denominations within the Protestant family constitute not kindred offshoots, but separate religions. Other writers insist that different ways of relating to the larger culture create new Christianities, while some imply that internal ethnic diversity makes, for example, Swedish Lutherans adherents of a different religion than Finnish Lutherans. In sum, the authors and editors are adamant that variety results in different religions rather than multiple expressions of a single religion.

The volume lures readers into fresh ways of thinking about the impact Christianity in its many forms has had on American culture. Despite the recent influx of immigrants who have fashioned a new pluralism, the stamp of Christian influence on American life remains. The first six essays focus on the extent of Christian diversity, while the next five highlight dimensions of practice. The six that follow show how Christianity/Christianities have affected every aspect of American culture from economics to literature, from science to the media. The concluding five essays examine issues of national identity and the role of Christianity/Christianites in the public square.

Few, however, tackle the vexing matter of when diversity in style, different approaches to issues such as homosexuality, or the role of women, or variant postures in the complex history of church-state relations, mean that entirely new religions have formed. In a masterful opening essay, Catherine Albanese builds on the image of a tree with many branches, an image that celebrates diversity while affirming relationships, just as branches are linked to the trunk of the tree. Albanese is one of the few to acknowledge the Eastern Orthodox traditions; if Protestant bodies and Roman Catholicism constitute separate religions, surely the Orthodox represent another.

Michael McNally's essay on Native American religious sensibilities wrestles more profoundly with the problem posed by the anthology's title. He demonstrates that the ways Native Americans appropriated aspects of various forms of Christianity from missionaries representing numerous Protestant groups, Roman Catholics, and Orthodox yielded not a hybrid mishmash, a casual blending of “this and that,” but something sui generis. In other words, new religions, new Christianities, and new Native American religious expressions, resulted. Similar reflection would have enriched Curtis Evans's essay on African American Christianities and enabled him to move beyond his careful consideration of how and why African American Christian churches approach issues of social welfare and justice differently from white congregations.

So, too, Jeanne Halgren Kilde's thoughtful piece on worship and architecture prompts further analysis than space allowed her. She deftly argues that ways of using space and material culture, along with the performance practices of worship accompanying them, refract much more than different ways of being Christian. They expose such divergent understandings of the sacred as to illuminate what may well be different religions, different Christianities. They reveal fundamentally different ways of being religious. Sally Promey's essay on other aspects of material culture, besides shattering commonly held preconceptions that Puritans, for example, had little aesthetic sensibility, likewise leaves readers wanting more.

Ironically, some authors tell stories that suggest more commonality than difference. Edith Blumhofer's engaging essay on methods of evangelization is one. Blumhofer appraises some of the methods for spreading the gospel, with methods ranging from railroad cars that took sacred space to frontier towns to automobiles that carried not only preachers but literature to convert the masses. Protestants and Catholics alike used these techniques to assure that Christian consciousness would penetrate the entire nation.

Rarely are all essays in an anthology provocative triggers, stimulating further conversation. The twenty-two in this collection do just that, even those that primarily synthesize what earlier analysts have argued. Even those that are descriptive overviews rather than groundbreaking forays into new interpretation are worth reading.

As in all essays designed to cast wide nets, there is occasional overstatement. Thomas Jefferson, for example, was not one of the framers of the U.S. Constitution, although he had an abiding influence on how this new nation understood its own character and how it would craft a relationship between religion and government, between church and state, that was worthy of a democratic republic that granted individuals the right to determine for themselves what to believe and how to live out that belief. As well, Jefferson's personal blending of tenets from Deism with the idiosyncratic understanding of the New Testament captured in the so-called Jefferson Bible makes him the prototype for the kind of Christianities at the heart of this anthology.

On balance, then, the strength of this collection lies in the multidimensional ways the authors probe how many aspects of Christianity or Christianities continue to shape American life and culture, even as increasing diversity and pluralism offer challenges. One wishes that more had the opportunity to wrestle with the vexing issue of just when diversity and variety within a tradition reaches the point that fresh expressions are no longer new branches grafted onto a single trunk, but new religions, new Christianities. Professors Brekus and Gilpin deserve thanks for stimulating a needed conversation.