Transnationalizing US Religious History and Revisiting the European Case

For decades, American religious history predominantly amounted to American national history. Its national identity is deeply ingrained in religious traditions and it has a lively religious heritage. Titles of influential and important recent books reveal something about the centrality of religion to nation building: "America's God, America's Pastor", and American Jesus . These titles suggest a unique, if not exceptional, development of the American religious scene. Embedded into a strongly religiously infused national narrative existing in the US, these works seemed to speak to America's religious exceptionalism.