N 1868 General U.S. Grant remarked that the United States possessed three great parties: "The Republican, the Democratic, and the Methodist Church." More recently my colleague Stanley Hauerwas quipped that "long after Christianity is dead and gone, the United Methodist Church will still be flourishing." When I share those wisecracks with my preponderantly Methodist seminary students, they invariably react with nervous laughter. There is just enough truth in them to make the comments worrisome as well as funny. David Hempton's brilliantly provocative book tells us why.

The book holds two aims. The first is to look at Methodism as an international enterprise--a global empire of the spirit. The second is to penetrate beneath the surface of Methodist institutions to grasp the "heart of something both elusive and important." Both aims assume that Methodism has been more than the sum of its parts.

Hempton, professor of church history at Boston University, pursues those goals in eight tautly argued essays. He explores how Methodism grew from a barely perceptible impulse in the Church of England in the 18th century to a foremost expression of Christianity in the modern world; how the mixing of Enlightenment rationality and evangelical enthusiasm resulted in Methodism's perennial doubleness of vision; how the Methodist message was heard, internalized and enacted in a bewildering variety of social and geographic locations; how opposition from outsiders fostered strength while conflict between insiders fostered weakness; how money was raised, spent and symbolized; how women and racial and ethnic minorities found nourishment in the Methodist message; how the movement managed to circle the globe completely; and finally, how a gaggle of theories about secularization might help us understand Methodism's decline in the latter half of the 20th century. Though the eight chapters interlock, each stands as an independent essay. Since I teach in a trinitarian divinity school, it seems apt to try to convey the flavor of the whole by focusing on three chapters.

The first chapter, "Competition and Symbiosis," asks a disarmingly simple question: How did it happen that a religious revival that first took root among the "flotsam and jetsam" of English society in the 1730s became, in just 150 years, one of the major religious movements of modern times? At the beginning of the 20th century, Methodism posted 9 million members, 36 million adherents and 150,000 ministers and lay preachers. It owned more than a half billion dollars worth of property, including hundreds of schools on six continents. Methodist steeples graced the skylines of villages, towns and cities everywhere. More important, John Wesley's theological children had moved to somewhere near the center of the culture in most of the English-speaking world. As late as 1950 Methodists in the U.S. alone numbered nearly 10 million members and claimed 6.4 percent of the population. In the 2004 election three of the four candidates for the nation's top jobs were Methodists. So again, how did all that come about?

Hempton is too subtle to give a single-cause answer, but he does suggest that evolutionary biology offers a clue. The secret lies in the symbiosis between the organism and the environment. More precisely, Methodist growth took place not in isolation but as an integral part of the New World order of the 18th and 19th centuries. Though Methodism remained a subspecies of the old Anglican establishment, it proved able to adapt to popular demands for seriousness over frivolity, cooperation over competition, compassion over force, and egalitarianism over deference. Hempton admits that Methodists' special packaging of means and ends--evangelical conversion, emotional assurance, entire sanctification, itinerant preaching, bottom-up associationalism, top-down connectionalism, communal discipline and national regeneration--is well appreciated, less well appreciated is how all of those ingredients worked together to create an elastic, mobile, aggressively expansive movement. Methodism survived as the fittest of the many religious options available.

Hempton's third chapter, "The Medium and the Message," says little about the message but a great deal about the medium. As for the message, he tells us that any effort to reduce Wesley's theology to a fixed quadrilateral of reason, experience, scripture and tradition falls "spectacularly" wide of the mark. Instead, Wesley's theology must be viewed as a dynamic quest for holy living, fueled by scripture and divine love. Even there, Hempton suggests, we come closest to the living pulse of Wesley's thinking not by reading his texts but by asking what he was willing to fight for. Versus Moravian quietism, he fought for active spirituality. Versus Calvinist particularism, he fought for the universal availability of God's grace. And versus almost everyone, he fought for the possibility of Christian perfection.

IF HEMPTON SKIRTS the intricacies of Wesley's theology, he delivers a virtuoso performance in showing how Wesley's words were translated into the rhythms of daily life. First of all, Methodists were noisy folk. They preached, exhorted, sang, cried and shouted. Those sounds are forever lost, but their echoes linger in a lavish array of texts. Fortunately, Methodists were furious record keepers and soul examiners. Hempton provides a close reading of the rich testimonial literature. The accounts are as different as snowflakes yet, taken together, reflect enduring patterns. Predictably, they showcase the many modalities of the experience of conversion, assurance and sanctification. Less predictably, they showcase other experiences too, including fear of backsliding, terror of death, the critical role of sermons, the importance of mutual support, the drama of moving from a state of sin to a state of grace and, of course, the sheer joy of the telling.

"Methodists absorbed their faith through the words of their hymns and sacred verse." No wonder. The songs, like the sermons, were practical. Jammed with active verbs and first-person pronouns, they encouraged pilgrims to shun the perils and embrace the promises of the Christian journey. They spoke of melting experiences, freedom in the spirit, communal support and the joys of Zion.

If the book has a jewel in its crown, it is the seventh chapter, "Mapping and Mission." The first of its many virtues is that it exists at all. We know a lot about European and North American missionary endeavors but surprisingly little about Methodists' contribution. For Hempton, the study of Methodist missions represents more than just filling holes in the literature. Rather it serves as a key for unlocking the whole enterprise. "To penetrate to the heart of Methodism as a missionary movement," he tells us, "is as good a way as any to understand the essence of the movement in its entirety." And what was that essence? The clue lies in the action-packed terms that drive the narrative: "momentum," "restless mobility," "expansionist dynamic," "rise to globalism," "expansion begat expansion" and, most memorably, from a 19th-century African bishop, "spread or die."

Missionary history is fiercely contested terrain, yet Hempton proves evenhanded. On one side, he offers little comfort to modern-day triumphalists. He makes clear that Methodist missions spread through the arteries of two great and expanding cultural impulses: British colonialism and American commerce. Everywhere, Methodist missionaries faced a fight. In Latin America, they went toe-to-toe with the Roman Catholic Church; in Europe, they took on the "protected monopolies" of the state churches; in the American West, they had to deal with other whites' treachery to the Indians. On the flip side, Hempton also makes clear that the gains, though modest, were real, especially in the American West and in Korea. By 1875 the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church was supporting more than 3,000 domestic missionaries alone.

Several themes recur in the book as a whole. One is the symbiotic fit between Methodism and America, especially the opportunities it afforded religious entrepreneurs in the 19th century. Not the least of history's ironies is that just 150 years after Wesley's death, three-fourths of the world's Methodists resided in the nation whose birth he fervently opposed.

A second theme is the "dialectical friction" that has marked most aspects of Methodist life. Competing ideals have marched like twin soldiers through the tradition's history: rationality versus enthusiasm, discipline versus ecstasy, wealth versus frugality, learning versus innocence, structure versus voluntarism.

A third theme, more implied than hammered in, is Methodism's steady accommodation to the conventions of middle-class life. The book's epigraph, which comes from George Eliot's Adam Bede, is telling. There was a time, Eliot wrote in 1858, when Methodism represented not "sleek grocers, sponging preachers, and hypocritical jargon," but men and women who drank in a faith that "linked their thoughts with the past, lifted their imagination above the sordid details of their own narrow lives, and suffused their souls with the sense of a pitying, loving, infinite Presence."

MANY OF US are fond of referring to "American religion," as if that were a thing to be described. But anyone who has spent much time on the ground (or in churches) knows that there are lots of ways in which that term has to be modified, and one of the most significant modifiers is regional. I have lived in six of the eight regions identified in the Religion by Region series, and who I am religiously, and who people think I am, has varied enormously according to where I was living.

As a kid in Missouri, I was a Baptist, and that identity said not only that I belonged to an important church but that I was on the right side of the great eternal divide, ready to defend my salvation against the other contenders around me. When my family moved to Arizona, I joined the tail end of the white evangelizers who hoped to bring faith and education to the Native American and Mexican laborer population that surrounded us. In southern California, our next stop, people thought we were from Texas and just figured we were one more in a trail of exotic breeds that seemed to flourish on the Pacific shores. What they didn't know was that Southern Baptists and other evangelicals were becoming an institutional force to be reckoned with.

More than a decade later, when I was a pastor's wife on the other coast, the people who heard "southern" and "Baptist" seemed to assume that meant "snake handler" and closed the door as quickly as possible. Then, when we actually moved to the South, we experienced the cognitive dissonance of being assumed to be part of the irresistible evangelical mainstream while practicing a form of Baptist life that eventually got our church kicked out of the denomination.

Now I live in New England, and I'm an American Baptist--part of the "mainline," but we're anything but mainstream and powerful. People are polite about our religious identity, but no one assumes that our church will make the news. The pages of our local paper are largely reserved tar the doings of the Roman Catholic Church.

Who makes the news--and why and how--is part of the story this series seeks to tell. In part, it is an attempt to educate the public, including reporters, on the unique religious history and ecology of America's regions. With funding from the Lilly Endowment, the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College in Hartford undertook the massive task of assembling scholars and data and producing eight books, each containing both demographic overviews and focused essays on the features that distinguish each region's religious life. Mark Silk and Andrew Walsh, the center's director and associate director, persuaded an impressive array of historians, sociologists and religion scholars to contribute their formidable insight.

As with any edited collection, some chapters are better than others, but on balance, there is plenty here to reward readers who want a closer look at the role of religion in the particular places that make up this extremely varied nation. Each volume includes introductions and conclusions that draw out common regional themes. There is also a general overview chapter that presents the necessary numbers--from ethnic and educational patterns to just how many Baptists or Catholics or, for that matter, Sikhs and Muslims there are in the U.S. The remaining chapters address the distinct practices and histories of the dominant groups and include a variety of essays that take up such topics as the roles of southern religious women, patterns of new religious immigration, and even the religious urban geography of Chicago. Taken together, they constitute an encyclopedic introduction to the myriad stories that make up "American religion."

THE QUALITY of this team of authors and editors was essential, because the statistical data from which they had to work simply cannot tell the whole story. The absence of a national religious census in the U.S. means that we are always confined to filling in numerical gaps with educated guesswork. Each of the sources used here provides a wealth of information, but each has significant limits as well--and the three do not overlap perfectly. The North American Religion Atlas (NARA) depends on the 2000 membership numbers compiled by the Glenmary Research Center (a decennial project undertaken since 1950). For many groups, these numbers provide a fairly accurate county-by-county picture, but to the extent that a group provided sketchy data (lots of round numbers always raise questions) or no data at all, these "adherent" numbers fail to reflect the actual religious composition of a given area.

For instance, Samuel Hill argues convincingly that many of the religions that thrive in Appalachia are precisely the sort that don't look kindly on anyone who wants to count them. The high number of presumed "nonadherents" in those counties distorts the picture.

In a different way, Kathleen Flake reminds us that a lot of the people not on the rolls of the local Latter-day Saints ward are probably nevertheless Mormon--just not in good enough standing to be counted. A nonadherent in either of these places is a very different thing from the nonadherent in the Pacific Northwest whose family has perhaps been unaffiliated with organized religion for generations. Just how many real nonadherents there are is something we simply cannot know.

And once you have a list of all those small groups, how on earth do you make sense of it? The result is often catch-all categories like "Baptist" (which includes both white and black Baptists) and "Christian unspecified." Neither designation tells us very much about the religious life of the people who are thus categorized (over a quarter of the population), nor does either overlap with the denominational categories used in the NARA. The authors of these books have worked heroically with the limitations of these data, using their own historical and cultural insights to make sense of the gaps.

The third source on which all the books rely is political polling by the Bliss Center at the University of Akron. Using national surveys done in 1992, 1996 and 2000, the authors have been able to describe some of the moral and political attitudes of the various religious groups in each region. From this we learn, for instance, that the liberal majority in the Pacific is composed of low-commitment mainliners, Catholics, other Christians, non-Christians and secularists. In New England, however, the liberal majority includes high-commitment Catholics and African-American and mainline Protestants, along with the non-Christians and secularists. Those two observations provide some interesting hints about how religion and politics might intersect differently in different regions, but the Bliss Center data lend themselves far better to the detailed statistical analysis one might find in a scholarly journal than to the broad-brush description these books are meant to provide.

The attempt to show how religion intersects with regional and local politics is more convincing in the specific cases various authors cite. The accommodation of American religious pluralism takes very local form, for instance. Whether rock climbers should have access to Wyoming's Devil's Tower is just one of many questions surrounding Native American sacred sites. Whether Hindus should be able to build a temple outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is one local variation on the difficulties facing new and unfamiliar groups who want to construct religious buildings.

But just as often, local efforts are part of a much bigger picture and shaped by outside players along with local ones. The Nevada Test Site is the focus for religiously based national public action, for instance, and struggles over gay rights and abortion are endemic everywhere. The latter struggles almost always call out the particular local mix of religious partisans, but rhetoric and tactics are remarkably similar whether the venue is Phoenix or Pittsburgh.

DOES THE INFLUENCE ever go the other way--from regional to national? Randall Balmer argues that the Middle Atlantic states gave us our patterns for dealing with the religious pluralism we face today. "Real liberty of worship in the American republic probably owes more to the fact that William Penn's 'Holy Experiment' worked than to any theory of the separation of church and state," he writes. The region remains a remarkable setting where a plurality of Catholics is joined by nearly half the nation's Jews, a full array of Protestants, and more representatives of Islam and various Eastern religions than any other region save the Pacific. Bowne Street, in Queens, has become an iconic territory, with members of more than 40 congregations of immense variety jostling for parking places.

In contrast to the Middle Atlantic's welcoming of a certain religious and cultural chaos, the South has more recently urged a more "properly ordered" way upon the nation. Paul Harvey argues that we largely have the South to thank for the rise of the religious right to national strength. Southern white evangelicals, now overwhelmingly Republican, are the vanguard of the culture war, defending their view of a properly ordered American way of life.

The irony of the South, of course, is that it could give the nation such different Baptist preachers as Martin Luther King Jr. and Jerry Falwell. What Andrew Manis calls the South's second "civil religion" has been equally influential on the national stage. Home to perhaps a quarter of the population in much of the South, African-American churches have provided the incubator in which a distinct religious-political vision of equality and justice has been nurtured.

The South is, of course, one of our most distinct regions, but even there the boundaries are not as clear as we might imagine. Only in New England does the sense of regional identity coincide with the geographical boundaries assigned to it.

One of the most interesting aspects of the portraits presented in these volumes is the way they cast doubt on the organizing scheme they are working with. Even in New England, as Stephen Prothero points out, it's hard to relate the densely populated and religiously diverse Fairfield County in Connecticut to Catholic and Jewish Boston and to unchurched and remote communities in the North Country. Does Florida really belong in the South, with its Catholic and Jewish southern half?. After describing the differences between Florida and Appalachia, Samuel Hill concludes, "Neither ... is typically southern, [but] they are nearer to being that than anything else."

Sometimes the blurring is around the edges, as when Phoenix starts to look more like L.A. than like Santa Fe or when northern Missouri looks more like the Midwest than like the "Southern Crossroads" that its southern half fits into, or when Maryland sits at the intersection of the Middle Atlantic to its north and the South on the other side.

Other regions, such as the "Mountain West," really are sets of distinct subregions--the Catholic and Native American heartland of Arizona and New Mexico, the Mormon Zion of Utah and southern Idaho, and the untamed mountain frontiers of northern Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and Colorado, where people with no religious preference compete with off-beat religious entrepreneurs seeking just this sort of isolation. Sometimes geography matters.

AND SO DOES history, nowhere more so than in that Mormon Zion. Nowhere else in the U.S. is something so close to a religious establishment still in place. LDS theology, linking spiritual and temporal governance, and the geography and history of Mormon settlement have created a combination of numerical and cultural dominance that spills into every corner of public life.

The particular migratory patterns of the 18th and 19th centuries show up in other places as well. There is the "German triangle" stretching from Cincinnati to Milwaukee to just west of St. Louis. Here the Catholics are German rather than Irish, the Lutherans aren't as likely to be Scandinavian, and the UCC churches were probably originally Evangelical and Reformed rather than Congregationalist. The Scandinavians, of course, moved to the upper Midwest, where Lutherans still dominate the culture even where they are not the numerical majority.

hey also often tell the stories of the odd religious pockets that interrupt the regional landscape. There are Lutheran counties in the Carolinas and Virginia, for instance, and communities of "converso" Jews in New Mexico. The Dutch Reformed populate Grand Rapids. Various Anabaptist groups created colonies from Pennsylvania to the Great Plains.

Today, of course, the landscape is also being reconfigured by new religious groups. One of the significant contributions of this series is its attention to those new arrivals, who are placed consistently into each local picture. Almost everywhere there are new immigrant communities. Latinos are the most numerous, overwhelming Catholic parishes in Texas and California, but also creating dozens of new Protestant congregations and spreading out far from these traditional destinations. While Eastern religions are strongest on the West Coast, where Asian immigration is strongest, Hindus, Buddhists and other groups are now found in sufficient numbers throughout the country to establish local temples and schools.

They, in turn, are shaped both by the transnational networks that sustain the community and by the local context itself. As Raymond Brady Williams writes, "Muslims in Chicago mosques represent a constellation of evolving ethnicities different from those experienced by any of the participants prior to migration and more diverse than anywhere outside of Mecca during the Hajj." As immigrants change each region's character, the region will shape them as well.

We also have to acknowledge that irreligion is an integral part of American culture, in some regions more than others. The Pacific Northwest is dubbed the "none zone" to highlight the fact that barely one third of its population shows up on the membership rolls of any of the groups that reported to NARA. As Patricia Killen notes, the region "has pretty much always been this way." It is simply normal not to go to church. Even California is considerably more "churched," though religious identification and loyalty tend to be very fluid in that state.

In both regions, however, there is a perhaps surprising and growing presence of evangelical and Pentecostal traditions. The Azusa Street revival of 1906 has been followed by a succession of southern California evangelical innovations, from those of Aimee Semple McPherson and Robert Schuller to the Vineyard and Calvary Chapel churches. Even in the Pacific Northwest, members of independent evangelical churches likely account for a substantial portion of those people who weren't otherwise counted as adherents in the NARA survey. As James Wellman points out, "Evangelical numbers have grown 32 percent in the last decade in Washington, and evangelicals now account for 38 percent of the church-affiliated population." Numbers like that may help to explain why conservative political initiatives there meet with success.