After taking time off from those studies to serve for two years as a Latter-day Saint missionary in the northeastern United States, he graduated in 1955 with a Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude in history.

[9] From 2008 to 2011, Bushman served as the first Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University and held a Huntington Library fellowship.

[5] Outside professoriate settings, in the twenty-first century Bushman also worked as an editor and later a national advisory board member for the Joseph Smith Papers, a project of the Church History Department.

[18] By 2020, Bushman had spent almost a decade intermittently writing a cultural history of the golden plates that Joseph Smith had described as the source of the Book of Mormon.

In 1968, Bushman's From Puritan to Yankee: Character and Social Order in Connecticut, 1690–1765 won the Bancroft Prize, an award given by the trustees of Columbia University for the year's best book on American history.

[12] Bushman has also received the Phi Alpha Theta prize, and Evans Biography Awards, administered by the Mountain West Center for Regional Studies at Utah State University.

[23] According to an article by the Los Angeles Times writer Larry Gordon, the initial response to the biography "garnered many positive reviews, although some critics said it uncomfortably straddled reverence and logic.

[7] As a young adult, he entered undergraduate studies at Harvard and there found himself struggling to communicate his religious beliefs in an environment in which logical positivism was current.

[7][24] Even so, Bushman interrupted his studies at Harvard to serve as a missionary for the church in New England and Atlantic Canada where he overcame doubts about the existence of God and became convinced that the Book of Mormon was right.