Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 360 pp., $25.00, cloth.

David W. Lotz, editor, Altered Landscapes: Christianity in America 19351985 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 376 pp., $27.95 cloth, $17.95, paper.

Mark Ellingsen, The Evangelical Movement: Growth, Impact, Controversy, Dialog (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1988), 484 pp., $24.95, cloth.

Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 272 pp., $10.00, paper.

George M. Marsden, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), 311 pp., $19.95, cloth.

Robert T. Handy, A History of Union Theological Seminary in New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 370 pp., $32.00.

G. K. Chesterton once described America as "a nation with the soul of a church." The acids of secularism and modernity have eroded the patina of that soul, but one of the most remarkable features of America in the 1980's is the persistence of religion as a major factor in the life of the nation.

Foreigners have been consistently surprised by this facet of the American character. Alexis de Tocqueville, who noted this religious character in the 1830's, was echoed a century and a half later by the English think-tank, Oxford Analytica, which noted "the quite extraordinary, even exceptional, vigor of religion in America in the 1980's." Their report continued: "In a day of declining American exceptionalism, religion is still a point where the U.S. is strikingly different."

Preachers packing their bags for summer reading will find six new volumes on American Christianity worthy companions for a journey across the religious landscape. The six volumes range from comprehensive works on religion in modern America, to the histories of two significant theological seminaries. Each offers an important perspective on the state of Christianity in the United States.

The Restructuring of American Religion, by Robert Wuthnow, is destined to be one of the most-quoted volumes of the decade. Wuthnow, professor of sociology at Princeton University, has produced one of the most significant studies of American Christianity written in the twentieth century. The fundamental thesis of Wuthnow's volume is that American religion has responded to the challenges of modernity and contemporary secularism by a process of restructuring.

Though secularism is a fact of life in the last decades of the twentieth century, Wuthnow demonstrates that the secularist theorists who predicted the demise of religion in America underestimated the religious nature of the American people. On the other hand, those who look to the contemporary religious scene and detect no great shifts from the religious structures of the Eisenhower years also miss the fundamental point -- that a major restructuring of American religion has taken place.