What Catholics Saw in America

Christian nationalism has a particularly bad odor these days (think January 6). But it is still the standard operating procedure for the study of Christian history. To the extent that historians tell the stories of particular communions (what Protestants called denominational history), they do so with the tools of the nation-state. Historians of Protestantism in the United States rarely if ever consider Canadian Protestantism, a major exception being Mark A. Noll's A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada. The idea of including Mexican churches in a study of American Christianity is almost as unthinkable as Donald Trump becoming president once was. Even after the turn from denominational to religious history, academics rarely follow their subjects through customs.