美国的宗教史美国的宗教研究传统上侧重于教堂的历史，并通过“新世界”中天主教帝国的规范性镜头和占主导地位的新教主流比喻来组织其历史档案和问题。圣经，清教徒的“山丘上的城市”，“清单上的命运”的概念以及许多民间宗教主题（例如，以“我们信任上帝”为座右铭，于1956年正式建立） ）。但这当然只是在美洲研究宗教的一种方式。“美国宗教史”的研究生领域具有不同的视角，既具有深远的历史意义，又具有根本的比较性。尽管人们非常关注圣经的根源和规范化的欧洲基督教传统，而事实上它们已成为文化的公共生活，思想和言论的主流，但这一
History of Religions in America The study of religion in the U.S. has traditionally focused on church history and has organized its historical archives and questions through the normative lenses of Catholic empire in the New World and the dominant Protestant tropes of the primacy of the Bible, the Puritan City on the Hill, the notion of a manifest destiny, and numerous civil religious themes (think, for example, of the In God We Trust motto, officially established in 1956). But this, of course, is only one way of studying religions in the Americas. The graduate area of History of Religions in America takes up a different lens, one at once deeply historical and radically comparative. While paying very close attention to the biblical roots and normative European Christian traditions that did in fact come to dominate the public life, thought and rhetoric of the culture, this area of study privileges no particular religious narrative or form of religious experience. It does not see history as linear, but as circular, taking seriously the hermeneutical loop of the future of the past, that is, the awareness that future peoples read the past in ways that past peoples could not and did not, so that the future changes the past, and the past changes the future of religions in America. Thus, this area of study pays close attention to the concepts of the present past (the persistent return, uptake and recalibrating of the past to benefit the present religious communities) and revelatory alignment (aligning the past with new revelatory experiences).