How Pivotal Events Shaped America and a Faith

As Elesha Coffman recounts in her book, Turning Points in American Church History, the English victory prompted the creation of celebratory models that read, “God blew, and they were scattered,” a reference to Job. Coffman’s book attempts the tall task of recounting centuries of history in just a few hundred pages. To do this, she elected to pick discrete, illustrative episodes from America’s Christian legacy to tell a broader story. She acknowledges the benefits and drawbacks of this approach, noting historian Mark Noll’s example; by focusing on distinctive turning points, an otherwise inscrutable subject can be rendered intelligible by joining individual facts together into a narrative while delving deeper into those essential events and actions. On the other hand, depth may come at the expense of breadth, leaving certain episodes mentioned passingly or not at all. Coffman navigates these challenges ably, providing an accessible summary of key events in America’s Christian history and their consequences.