Thoroughly Centered: The Reformed Tradition and American Religious History

Historians once were blind, but now they see. Where the secularization thesis once ruled the day, the evangelical paradigm now oft holds sway. Historians both of intellectual elites and of the common folk have begun to explore the same question which participants of the H-AMREL online discussion group periodically toss about: Why are Americans so religious? Jon Butler, one of the premier historians of American religion, has recently even warned against overusing the evangelical paradigm. Thirty years ago historians would not have needed that warning; today it stands as a useful brake against the tendency to see religion anywhere and everywhere.

Colonial and antebellum America have been particularly well-served in American religious history. Just to name a few, Butler, Patricia Bonomi, Harry S. Stout, Leigh Schmidt, Charles Cohen, Nathan Hatch, Richard Carwardine, and Mitchell Snay have provided provocative syntheses of colonial religion, colonial and early national revivalism, the advance of Christianization against folk traditions, the explosion of democratic religious movements in the early national period, and the complicated interplay of religion and politics in the antebellum years. ¹ The religious history of post-Civil War America remains more of an open field. Perhaps the story of the “fall” lacks the same inherent drama as the story of the “rise.”

Much recent work has focused on topics in social and cultural history. The early national period has been a particularly fruitful field for explorations of religious populism in America, which took advantage of religious disestablishment to capture plain folk who hungered for communal celebrations of religious experience. The antebellum era has also produced numerous studies of the smallest details of everyday religious experience, including artifacts in the home, charts and images of millennial predictions, hymn and prayer books, family genealogies in Bibles, popular religious fiction, and family altars. ² Sociologists of religion have asked big questions about “secular” trends in church membership and attendance, charting patterns which document the long-range religiosity of Americans and the different institutions which best meet religious needs in different periods. ³

Paul K. Conkin takes account of all these approaches in his encyclopedic coverage of the Reformed tradition in America, but his forte is in intellectual history. The real strength of this book lies in its intricate and thorough explorations of the ability of the Reformed tradition in America to reform itself constantly and remain in the center of American culture. By Reformed Christianity, Conkin means “those branches of Christianity that traced their modern origins to the reforms not of Luther but of Ulrich Zwingli, John Calvin, Martin Bucer, John Knox, Thomas Cramner, and dozens of other architects of national churches on the European continent and in Britain.” The churches arising from the work of these reformers “occupied the center” of Christianity in America. Their centeredness declined in the antebellum years, Conkin informs us, from 90 percent of American Christians in 1776 to 60 percent in 1865. But even at the end of the Civil War the Reformed groups “easily exceeded, in overall cultural and political and economic influence, all the other branches of Christianity combined” (p. ix).

The Reformed denominations all may be traced back to a commonality of doctrines associated with John Calvin. But in America many of the Reformed groups, especially the Methodists, dissociated themselves from “Calvinism,” while other groups set themselves apart from this or that particular Calvinist doctrine, and still other groups prided themselves on their strict adherence to the Calvinist scheme. At the very least, Calvinism provided a kind of reference point — positive or negative — by which Reformed groups defined themselves. The Reformed groups were all “evangelical,” in the broad sense that they believed God revealed Himself in scripture and that salvation is through faith alone. The Reformed groups, as Conkin defines them, are broadly inclusive of mainstream American Protestantism. The major groups include (going in order from high church expressions to lower church groups): Anglicans (in the colonial era), Episcopalians...