Over the past twenty years, scholars of American religion have been heavily engaged in theoretical and jurisprudential debates—about the mutual constructed-ness of “religious” and “secular,” the power struggle(s) behind the prerogative to define “religion,” the religious significance of consumption, sports, or other supposedly secular modern rituals, etc.—that have dramatically stretched our understanding of the “religious experience” and reinforced the skepticism toward institutional religion already pervasive in our profession and society since the late 1960s. Since Robert Orsi and David Hall pioneered the turn to “lived religion,” much historical scholarship has focused on the ways religion acted as a meaning-making device even in the “nooks and crannies” (to borrow Maffly-Kipp’s words) of human experience that seemed farthest removed from churches and other self-appointed religious spaces. While acknowledging the significant contribution of this body of scholarship to our field, the historians in this session are bucking the trend. Our work suggests that due focus on the institutions of American religion—far from reinstating the uncritical personal and professional deference of past scholarly generations to religious hierarchies—highlights rather than obscures how personal religious commitments translated into the sphere of social and political activism. Whereas an emphasis on the “religious experience” tends to foreground variables of class, ethnicity, race, and gender as its determinants, ultimately turning “religion” into a virtually empty category, centering institutions serves as a powerful reminder that religious affiliation often stood in a relationship of creative tension with social and political identities such as citizen, consumer, worker, suburbanite, etc. Our goal is emphatically not to claim religious institutions’ “purity” as aloofness from social and political conflict, much less as unfailing innocence towards its members, but rather to restore them to their rightful place as primary historical actors in the drama of American religion—as the privileged site where “religion” could leave its mark on history as a variable in its own right, if in constant dialectic relationship with ever-changing social and political realities.