History Commons^™

Managing A Merger, William Vance Trollinger

William Vance Trollinger Jr.

It was not the sort of place where one would expect to find the folks who produced the More-with-Less Cookbook, but the massive and hermetically sealed Opryland complex in Nashville was where 9,330 Mennonites gathered in early July for a momentous meeting. The two largest Mennonite bodies in the U.S. — the General Conference Mennonite Church (established in 1860) and the Mennonite Church (formally established in 1898, but with roots that go back much further) — voted to merge into one denomination, the Mennonite Church USA, after first finding a way to address the issue of homosexuality.

Is There A Center To American Religious History?, William Vance Trollinger

William Vance Trollinger Jr.

Is there a center to American religious history? Of course, this question grows out of what David Wills has referred to as “the perennial debate that always seems to hold center stage as the Big Issue in the field ... [that is,] the ongoing quarrel between those who center their stories on the culturally formative role of a dominant Protestantism and those who emphasize the countervailing forces of religious pluralism and toleration.”

As I take the question, Is there some sort of center to American religion – dominant Protestantism or otherwise – that enables us to tell the story of …