ELESHA J. COFFMAN. Turning Points in American Church History: How Pivotal Events Shaped a Nation and a Faith. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2024. Pp. 290. $24.99 (U.S.)
Elesha Coffman’s Turning Points in American Church History: How Pivotal Events Shaped a Nation and a Faith is a valuable and readable survey of American church history. Every American, Christian or not, would do well to read this balanced assessment of how Christianity and the United States have shaped one another for both good and ill. Turning Points is well-written enough for pleasure reading and informative enough to serve as a textbook for a church or American history class.
The format of the book is unique and engaging: each chapter covers one turning point, with “turning point” used to mean a deeply impactful event rather than a branching-off point from which to play with other possible historical paths. Each chapter opens with a hymn and closes with a prayer from the era being discussed; these framing devices, in addition to the sections of primary documents included as sidebars in each chapter, bring the reader closer to the period being covered and would serve as engaging teaching tools in the classroom setting. I also appreciated that Coffman included a further readings list for each chapter topic.
The “turning points” format is borrowed from Coffman’s mentor and friend, Mark Noll, who also contributed the book’s foreword. Coffman mentions Noll’s Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity as part of her inspiration in the book’s introduction, citing the format as “a way of covering a lot of material while avoiding the tendency of survey texts to feel like they are eighty-five miles long and an inch deep” (1). Indeed, Coffman certainly succeeds in holding substantive discussions of how the selected events have impacted American Christianity (and American identity) while also keeping the discussion moving.
Two notable strengths undergird this work: the first is Coffman’s expansive coverage of the true breadth of the American church scene—other comparable works I’ve encountered have not given sufficient discussion to the Catholic church in the United States, perhaps inadvertently betraying their white Protestant assumptions about American identity. Coffman does well to trace Catholic presence in the New World from the first chapter to the last. I also deeply appreciated the chapter, “Los Angeles Fire: Azusa Street Revival Catalyzes Pentecostalism,” which treated an often-ignored movement within the Christian family with care and curiosity. A full chapter on other new-world Christian movements—like Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—could have been useful as well, though these and other movements are mentioned in passing.
The second overall strength is Coffman’s deft and frank discussions of how race has often divided the American church. From tracing how African Americans became Christians even while enslaved by their nominally-Christian enslavers, to a deep discussion of the role of theological division preceding the Civil War, Coffman does well to remind white readers that American churches have long been multiracial and multicultural. It is important to remember that white Christians have often excluded and disempowered Christians of color across the denominational spectrum—and that African Americans and other people of color continue to serve God and the church despite the failures of their white siblings in faith. Coffman’s discussion of Native American Christians—primarily in the chapter “A Collision of Cultures: King Philip’s War, 1675-76”—was also quite profound, highlighting how Christians from the Mohegan and Massachusett Nations, among others, sought to be faithful to the way of Jesus even in the midst of rejection from full membership in both white and Native American society—and how their Christianity did not save them from the violence of white Americans.
As she opens her work, Coffman’s ability to connect the events of the earliest days of European colonization of North America to our church life today demonstrates both talent and skill. However, I think the book picks up steam as it progresses. The weakest chapter is the first: “The Old World Order Upended: The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 1588.” While some discussion of the religio-political lay of the land in Europe was certainly necessary as background, I am not convinced that this was the correctly-identified turning point to launch the book. Going earlier—to the Reformation itself, or to the discovery of the Americas, or to the birth of Anglicanism—would have provided the same introductory opportunities and been both more theologically centered and more in line with the other turning points Coffman selected.
While there isn’t a great deal of focus on the less prominent churches throughout the book, it is evident Coffman is writing from an Anabaptist perspective; her mentions of Brethren, Mennonites, and other Anabaptist groups would surely not have appeared if it had been written by someone outside the Anabaptist world. From my Mennonite perspective, the ways Coffman included without overemphasizing Anabaptism was well handled. There are countless times we ignore, at our peril, the events in the broader Christian community that indelibly shape our own churches. Placing our small traditions within the much larger general narrative of church history in the United States is more needed than ever, particularly as we continue to live in the shadow of Coffman’s final identified turning point: “Religion Moves Right: The Election of Ronald Reagan, 1980.”
As a former copy editor, I appreciate the work of both Coffman and her editorial team, who did an excellent job in preparing this book for publication. I spotted only one typographical mistake: Roger Williams’s poem is stated to have been written in 1536, seventy years before he was born, rather than 1636 when he was celebrating God’s protection and the survival of the early New England colonies (49).
This is an excellent book that improved my understanding of both the church and the United States—I highly recommend it and will be watching for future works by Coffman.