| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Mark A. Noll. America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press. 2002. Pp. xiii, 622. $35.00.
The title of this book does not begin to capture the breadth of the author's coverage of American theological developments, any more than this brief review can begin to do justice to the author's subtle, thick analysis of those developments. Mark A. Noll has undertaken to do nothing less than trace in elaborate historical detail the transformation of a religious intellectual heritage wrenched away from its defining European characteristics to yield a distinctively American tradition.	1
Noll's argument is that American Protestant thinking, the altogether dominant American theology between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries, eventually gathered evangelical Christianity, republican political ideology, and commonsense moral philosophy into a synthesis that rendered the American Protestant perspective altogether pertinent to the American republic but made that perspective as different from the Protestantism of the Reformation as Reformation Protestantism was different from Roman Catholicism. In the full flowering of this synthesis, the sovereign being of Jonathan Edwards's God became the moral law giver of Edwards's disciples; the virtue of benevolence to being in general became the republican virtue of disinterested public service and eventually private goodness; sin as a deep flaw of character turned into specific deeds or actions; freedom changed from the ability to do what one chooses into the ability to choose what one wills and liberty from the customs, authorities, and traditions of the past; the larger meanings of Scripture were overlooked on behalf of the literal "facts" of a Bible "scientifically" interpreted; and the instructions of tradition, divine inspiration, and discursive reasoning were replaced by the intuitive common sense of the individual, liberated American.	. . .

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