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Reviews of Books
| America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. By Mark A. Noll. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv, 622. $35.00.)
Reviewed by David D. Hall
, Harvard University
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In 1844, the Old School Presbyterian minister Robert Baird announced to Europeans that Christian churches were flourishing in the United States despite their "voluntary" situation, that is, making do without financial support from any civil government. Baird's seven-hundred-plus-page Religion in the United States of America was a paeon to the "voluntary principle." Yet he was no disinterested observer of the contemporary scene. By "religion" he meant his own tradition, the "evangelical churches in the United States." All others received brief notice in a short chapter on "nonevangelical denominations"—four pages on Roman Catholics and the same or less on such groups as Universalists, Mormons, and Unitarians. The European reader would have learned little of the turmoil that was roiling evangelical Protestantism in the 1830s and 1840s. Only in a brief paragraph did Baird note that slavery was a concern to some (unspecified) Protestants.1 |
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Baird's report embodied an interpretive framework that continues to influence our understanding of religion in the antebellum period. Within this framework the central question is: How did Protestantism become "American," that is, how did the Protestant denominations accommodate themselves to the American experiment in church and state but also to wider values in the culture? What gives this question its force is the astonishing success of some groups during the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War, when the Baptists and Methodists, for example, came from nowhere to head the list of Protestant denominations. The growth of these evangelical denominations became, for Baird, the key to understanding Americanization. Evangelicals adopted "American" traits (just as other groups remained "European") and in doing so ensured their triumph. Baird was certain, for example, that the "energy, self-reliance, and enterprise" of Americans in general (though free white men were surely the reference group) accounted for the capacity of Protestantism to succeed despite the seeming handicap of the voluntary principle. |
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Mark A. Noll's America's God is an immensely ambitious sequel to Religion in the United States, rearguing the importance of evangelicalism in ways that both incorporate and expand on Baird's interpretation. Asserting that a mere 17 percent of Americans were churched as of 1790, Noll ties his narrative to the rise of "evangelical" groups to near hegemony by midcentury. Their extraordinary growth has much to do, he argues, with the strong sympathies among most Protestant clergy for the political ideology of "republicanism," sympathies that were accompanied by an emerging agreement among evangelical clergy and theologians, also in response to pressure from the wider culture, that the self was properly understood as having agency, or being "free." Taking these steps enabled evangelicals to become "American," unlike their British and Canadian counterparts who, he seeks to demonstrate, never relinquished a preference for some form of establishment and hesitated to employ the language of republican "liberty." In this country, however, the harmony between religious and civic versions of freedom enabled evangelical Protestantism to play a major role in the fashioning of American nationalism. Another major theme of the book is the (surprising) unanimity among evangelical Protestants on the merits of a common sense epistemology and the moral theory that went with it. Again the consequences were large, for this moral theory provided, Noll asserts, the glue that held civil society together. |
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