This article tests the assumption that Horace Bushnell was the father of the religious education movement, despite the fact that at least two generations lapsed between the final edition of his groundbreaking book, Christian Nurture, in 1861 and the formation of the Religious Education Association in 1903. It contends that William Rainey Harper was both the father of the movement and the founder of the Religious Education Association, while Bushnell can be viewed as the spiritual father of the movement, with Henry Clay Trumbull as the link between the two. George Albert Coe can be seen as the dean of religious educators and a leader of the movement in the first half of the 20th century.

(1978). PART I ‐‐ THE PROGRESSIVE ERA WILLIAM RAINEY HARPER: FOUNDER OF THE RELIGIOUS EDUCATION ASSOCIATION. Religious Education: Vol. 73, No. sup1, pp. 7-16.

On 11th January 1989 Ronald Reagan, under whose administration, according to Richard V. Pierard and Robert D. Linder, 'civil religion reached a new pinnacle in the American experience as it was exalted by a powerful, priestly president? delivered his farewell address to the nation. After extolling the successes of the previous eight years, Reagan summarised the accomplishments of his two terms in office with these words: 'We made the city strongerwe made the city freer and we left het in good hands'. No one conversant in American history could have failed to grasp the significance of the allusion encoded in that image. The city to which Reagan referred is the American nation, carved out of the wilderness by divine providence and called to be, in the words penned by the seventeenth-century Puritan, John Winthrop, while en route to Massachusetts colony, 'a city upon a hill' with the task of serving as a beacon to Europe and the world. By means of this metaphor, the outgoing President was once again employing the language of an exceptionally powerful aspect of the American ethos, namely, civil religion, an aspect of which many observers maintain had come to characterise the Reagan era as a whole. Put simply, the phenomenon termed civil religion refers to the blending of religious piety with patriotic sentiments. It is the use of religious terminology and categories as a vehicle to speak of the aspirations and goals of a specific nation. In their book, Twilight 0/ the Saints, Linder and Pierard offer an expanded definition: civil religion

(1971). ABSTRACTS OF DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS IN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION, 1968‐1969. Religious Education: Vol. 66, No. 3, pp. 207-228.