By surveying the religiously pluralistic setting of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Shenandoah Valley, Longenecker reveals how the fabric of American pluralism was woven. Calling worldliness the "mainstream" and otherworldliness, "outsidernesss," Shenandoah Religion describes the transition certain denominations made in becoming mainstream and the resistance of others in maintaining distinctive dress, manners, social relations, economics, and apolitical viewpoints.