As recently as a few decades ago, most people would have described America as a predominantly Protestant nation. Today, we are home to a colorful mix of religious faiths and practices, from a resurgent Catholic Church and a rapidly growing Islam to all forms of Buddhism and many other non-Christian religions. How did this startling transformation take place?

A great many factors contributed to this transformation, writes Amanda Porterfield in this engaging look at religion in contemporary America. Religious activism, disillusionment with American culture stemming from the Vietnam war, the influx of Buddhist ideas, a heightened consciousness of gender, and the vastly broadened awareness of non-Christian religions arising from the growth of religious studies programs--all have served to undermine Protestant hegemony in the United States. But the single most important factor, says Porterfield, was the very success of Protestant ways of thinking: emphasis on the individual's relationship with God, tension between spiritual life and religious institutions, egalitarian ideas about spiritual life, and belief in the practical benefits of spirituality. Distrust of religious institutions, for instance, helped fuel a religious counterculture--the tendency to define spiritual truth against the dangers or inadequacies of the surrounding culture--and Protestantism's pragmatic view of spirituality played into the tendency to see the main function of religion as therapeutic.

For anyone interested in how and why the American religious landscape has been so dramatically altered in the last forty years, The Transformation of Religion in America offers a coherent and persuasive analysis.

"An impressive and dexterous study of elite ideas, culture, and religion in the last half of the twentieth century, one that crosses intellectual boundaries. This is intellectual history of a very high quality."--Randall Balmer, Ann Whitney Olin Professor of American Religion, Barnard College, Columbia University

"An insightful and beautifully written account of the evolution of religious ideas and themes in a post-Protestant America. The sweep of her grasp, and the continuities she uncovers amidst so much change from the Puritan past to the spiritual ferments of the present are impressive."--Wade Clark Roof, J.F. Rowny Professor of Religion and Society, University of California at Santa Barbara

"We live today in the United States on the other side of a great religious transformation, Amanda Porterfield claims in this provocative, informed, and engaging work. Where others have seen simply decline or revival, Porterfield shows how the deconstruction of fundamental religious categories by cultural turmoil in the Sixties opened the way for new religious actors, new ideas, and for the creative reconstruction of our notions of God, person, body, gender, and of religion itself. Attentive both to continutiy and rupture, surveying a wide range of topics--including Buddhist psychotherapy, the politics of the body, and the infusion of Catholic sacramentalism into American culture--Porterfield invites a rethinking of the origins and meanings of the 'post-Protestant and even post-Christian world of contemporary American life.' This book will be widely read and discussed."--Robert Orsi, Indiana University

Amanda Porterfield is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Wyoming and president-elect of the American Society of Church History. She lives in Laramie, Wyoming.