Pilgrims in Their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in America

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 512 pages
• Published by: Penguin Non-Classics August 6, 1985
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0140082689
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0140082685
• Book Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 1 inches
• Weighs: 11.2 ounces

Reader Reviews
For a highly readable and engaging history of religion in America, you can't get much better than Marty. "Pilgrims" is the work of an accomplished scholar who knows how to write history as it should be: an ongoing drama filled with interesting characters moved by varying motivations. All historians, however, let their personal worldviews slip onto the page, and this is the only complaint that I have about Marty. As a liberal Protestant theologian and historian he has a tendency to discredit evangelical theology. This is not so much of a problem when he deals with the great evangelicals of previous centuries (the Francis Asburys and the Jonathan Edwards, for example), but as he approaches the twentieth century he clearly favors the theology of, say, Reinhold Niebuhr or Walter Rauschenbusch over the conversion theology of Billy Graham (perhaps he thinks Jesus' statement that, "you must be born again," applies only to conservative politicians?). This is a minor quibble, however, and one that is to be expected. Marty paints the picture of American religious life as a vivid panorama of people and movements committed, in their own way, to that particularly American brand of the human search for God.