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Reviews in American History 32.1 (2004) 7-13



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Faith and Society:
The Making of a Christian America

Francis J. Bremer


Mark Noll. America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln . New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. xiv + 622 pp. Tables, appendix, glossary, and index. $35.00.

Sitting in Lancaster, Pennsylvania's Long Park for a July 4th concert, I saw a man whose American flag-adorned T-shirt proclaimed "God is our refuge and strength, an ever present help in time of trouble. Therefore we will not fear." A few months later, the front page of the New York Times carried a headline that announced "Evangelicals Sway White House on Human Rights Abroad." 1 The impact of religion is evident everywhere in our public life, and yet mainstream scholars of American history have been generally reluctant to explore the dynamic between faith and citizenship. Uneasy with how to document spiritual influence, often confusing zeal with fanaticism, authors of texts and monographs ignore what for many Americans has been at the core of their being. Even those who call for a return to the teaching of traditional values often neglect the history of faith. For example, specific references to religion are absent from the legislative discussions of what constitutes "traditional American history" in the valuable "Teaching American History" initiative funded by Congress. 2 Yet the relationship of faith to our political culture is precisely what Mark Noll grapples with in this far ranging and important study, America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln.

Noll begins his study with a discussion of "The Long Life and the Final Collapse of the Puritan Canopy," but greatly compresses the early portions of that life in getting to Jonathan Edwards, whose ideas and role mark the true start of the story. Many readers will be tempted to treat this book as an overview of American religious history to the Civil War and to judge it accordingly. Looked at from that perspective Noll's relative neglect of the seventeenth century stands in marked contrast to works such as Sydney Ahlstrom's Religious History of the American People (1972) and E. Brooks Holifield's anticipated Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (2003). But Noll did not intend to write a broad survey and he is certainly entitled to begin his story when America is assuming a [End Page 7] distinct cultural identify and the people's God is being thought of as "America's God." That being granted, the fact that the central theme of the book is how American theology cut itself loose from the religious traditions and beliefs of Europe requires a better understanding of the complexities of earlier American religion than is always demonstrated here. To paint eighteenth-century revivalists as American innovators who "compromised the traditional importance of inherited structures by placing more emphasis on the individual's reception of God's grace than on the individual's place in an inherited ecclesiastical order" seems peculiar at best given the stances that early puritans, Quakers, and Baptists brought to the colonies in the seventeenth century (p. 106). The need to paint a picture with broad strokes and the desire to advance a thesis of Americanization throughout the book lends itself to what some will see as oversimplification of European traditions and their influence on American thought.

The second part of the book focuses on the synthesis that developed between American Protestantism and republican political thought. "Republicanism" has been a much contested concept in writings about eighteenth-century and early national America, and even those familiar with that literature may wish to interrupt their progress through America's God at this point to read Noll's appendix on the "Historiography of Republicanism and Religion," which sets forth his understanding of the relationship between the two. In the appendix Noll references the contributions of Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood in his discussion of the evolution of recent scholarship on republicanism, but he doesn't make much of...

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