“Alternative Christianities”

Gallagher, Eugene V. “Alternative Christianities.” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 17, no. 4 (2014): 5–12. 

Gallagher provides an introduction to this particular volume of Nova Religio featuring four articles, each highlighting an alternative Christianity founded in the United States. Each of these alternatives was able to maintain continuity and gain legitimacy by retaining elements of the dominant Christianity and texts of its day. They aligned with core sacred traditions, and some religious authority and understandings of moral rectitude particularly situated in Christian scripture. “…[E]ach of them derives a novel message from familiar symbolic capital” (8). The novelty comes through “the creative exercise of interpretive ingenuity” (5) to define themselves as distinct from the mainstream understandings of those same texts. They “chart a path between emphasizing the cultural continuity that can promote their legitimacy and the cultural dissonance that highlights their novelty” (9). Specific to Christian Science, see Nova Religio entry by Willsky (2014) illustrating how Joseph Smith Jr., Mary Baker Eddy, and Henry David Thoreau generated their own unique responses to traditional 19^th-century interpretations of the Bible.

ISSN: 1541-8480
Print ISSN: 1092-6690

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2014.17.4.5

Access via JSTOR here.