Self-Help and Popular Religion in Modern American Culture

The second of two volumes on the relationship between popular religion and the self-help tradition in American culture, this book continues chronologically where the first left off. As with the first volume, this work focuses on the intersection of American history and popular religion and is intended as an introductory interpretive guide to major self-help figures and movements with origins in popular religious movements. This volume spans from Romanticism, the Gilded Age, and the history of Christian Science, with discussions of Mary Baker Patterson, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, and Mary Baker Eddy, through Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schuller. Peale and Schuller, with the exception of Evangelist Billy Graham, constitute the public face of mainstream American Protestantism and bring this two-volume study to its conclusion in the second half of the 20th century.

This reference will serve as a valuable research tool for American religion and popular culture scholars. Together with the first volume, Self-Help and Popular Religion in Early American Culture, these two meticulously researched volumes clearly define and present the broad scope of the self-help tradition as it pervades American culture and as it developed and was influenced by popular religion. An extensive bibliography is included.

ROY M. ANKER teaches English and Film at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In addition to many scholarly and popular essays, he edited and co-wrote Dancing in the Dark: Youth, Popular Culture, and Electronic Media (1991).