The Restructuring of American Religion

Reviews / Votes

"Illuminates great reaches of society beyond the confines of cathedral and chapel, tabernacle and temple... So mountainous is the factual material on such a myriad of subjects and so thoughtful are the author's interpretations, grounded in a mastery of social science theory, that one can only be grateful for this brilliant examination of the public dimensions of religious culture."--American Historical Review "[The Restructuring of American Religion] is the most expansive and one of the most profound inquiries into the condition of American religious structure since World War II... To carry on debates about this structure now without reference to Wuthnow would be to attempt to track a landscape of near-chaos without using the best available road map and set of markers. It is likely that we will be citing 'Wuthnow' as we have been referring eponymically to major interpretations of 'Herberg' or 'Berger' or 'Bellah.'"--Martin Marty, Religious Studies Review "This book is the most significant interpretation of recent American religious history available."--John M. Mulder, Theology Today "An extremely penetrating, nuanced, and largely convincing account of what is really happening to American religion--an account worthy of comparison with, say, Herberg's Protestant-Catholic-Jew, or H. Richard Niebuhr's The Social Sources of Denominationalism, although Wuthnow's argument ultimately supersedes both."--Wilfred M. McClay, Commentary