Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans

In this bold new study, R. Laurence Moore considers the dynamic role that alleged religious "outsiders" -- the Mormons, Catholics, Jews, Christian Scientists, Millennialists, 20th-century Fundamentalists, and black churches -- have played in shaping American history. Through these groups, Moore shows that the conventional distinctions between what is "mainstream" and what is "marginal" in American culture are largely fictions created by historians and historical actors, and that many of these "o…