The Books of My Life: The Kingdom of God in America

H. Richard Niebuhr, the brother of prominent, well known, and influential historian, foreign policy commentator, and social ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr, wrote three books that are now considered classics in the sociology, cultural history, ethography, theology, and social ethics of American Christianity. The first, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929), explores how region or geography, race, and class impacted American religion, particularly American Protestantism, and divided it. The second, Christ and Culture (1951), explores, by typologising how Christian groups conceptualised the relation between Jesus and the world (Christ against culture, Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ transforming culture), the relationship between the church and the world. The third, The Kingdom of God in America (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1937), explores the key, central, or dominant cultural symbols at the heart of American Protestantism.

Taking what we would today call a symbolic anthropological approach with its emphasis on "going native" and key symbols,  Niebuhr argues that three key interrelated symbols, the sovereignty of God, the kingdom of Christ, and the coming kingdom, with varying emphases and in various permutations, have been at the centre of American Protestantism since the colonial era whether Puritan Protestantism, Quaker Protestantism, evangelical Protestantism, or the Protestant social gospel. Niebuhr also argues, in Durkheimian fashion, that over time these key symbols were secularised and, as a result, became central or key symbols in the American civil religion with its emphasis on American choseness,  whether as a result of divine grace or because America is nature's nation, American mission, and the coming utopian age that will arise out of American choseness and America's mission to the world.

The Kingdom of God in America is a classic for good reason. It should be essential reading for anyone interested in American history, American culture, American religion, Protestantism, and American Protestantism though not everyone will find its mix of history, ethnography, and reformed theology, its mix of descriptive and normative analysis, in other words, compelling. Highly recommended for its historical and ethnographic approach and analysis.