How does 'authority' function in a clerical context? E. Brooks Holifield, Charles Howard Candler Professor of American Church History, challenges traditional assumptions about the rise and fall of influence among the Christian clergy across American religious culture.

In his forthcoming book, God's Ambassadors, Holifield argues against those who depict the twentieth century as a period of unambiguous decline in clerical authority. A historical look at the American clergy reveals that challenges to their authority have a long history. At least since the seventeenth century, pastors and priests have faced opposition both from the culture and from laity and other clergy within the church.

Holifield acknowledges-and documents-the extent to which a marked decline in authority has taken place in such "subsidiary realms" of clerical activity as politics, law-making, higher education, publishing, and other domains outside the religious sphere. American clergy exercise, for instance, much less influence on state legislatures today than they did in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when they often helped write laws. And the number of clergy holding prominent positions in higher education also has declined. But he argues that in their "primary realm"-religious leadership within the more than 300,000 local congregations in America-the clergy function with much the same authority they had from the 17th to the late 19th century.

Holifield's research in American religion has its own history. He is the author of foundational studies of theology and religion in America and early modern England, including The Covenant Sealed (1974), The Gentleman Theologians (1978), and A History of Pastoral Care in America (1983). His award-winning Theology in America (2003) is the first full-scale study of American theology in the antebellum period. One reviewer described the book as unique in its "comprehensive account of American theology as an indigenous intellectual tradition." The same reviewer also observed that "all scholars of Christian theology and American intellectual history are indebted to him."

Holifield's next project will explore the religious life of children from the seventeenth century to the American Civil War. He is especially interested in children's religious attitudes, ideas, and practices as articulated in their letters and diaries. The idea for the study took shape as part of Holifield's participation in the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory (CSLR). There he analyzed historical documents by Protestant children, including a journal written in the eighteenth century by an intellectually precocious twelve-year-old girl. Her writing about the doctrine of predestination and her interest in the catechism, says Holifield, reflect a "quality of religious sophistication that would be hard to match by a twelve-year-old today."

Holifield received the Emory Williams Teaching Award in 2003. He teaches students to be critical readers and concise writers. With seminary students, he attempts to "convey an appreciation for the varieties of possibilities within Christian traditions." In lectures on the history of Christian thought from the sixteenth century to the present, he encourages students to discover for themselves that their religious traditions contain surprising variety and diversity. In the end, being a good teacher, he says, means inviting students to engage history in ways that enable them to "live with more excitement about the diversity and plurality in our own society."