America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (review)

Although antebellum American religious thought has not been a hot topic in the academy of late, two new books on the subject, both magisterial in scope, have arrived: E. Brooks Holifield's Theology in America (New Haven, 2003) and Noll's America's God. Although both books cover much of the same ground and reflect their respective authors' participation in a common discourse, Noll differs from Holifield in his more selective treatment of thinkers, his emphasis on evangelicalism, and his intention of writing "a social history of theology" (5-6). Noll is also especially interested in reviving the much-maligned notion of American exceptionalism as an interpretive category.

How do these emphases play out in detail? First, in terms of an emphasis on social history, Noll draws broadly both on contemporary historians, such as Hatch and Wood, as well as on classic social theorists such as Habermas and, at least implicitly, Weber.¹ His emphasis throughout is on the social causes and consequences of a distinctively American version of evangelical Christianity, especially its power to help create a unified social order in the wake of a profoundly disruptive Revolution. Noll argues specifically that this uniquely American Christianity resulted from the coming together of three distinct intellectual strains—post-Great Awakening evangelical Protestant religion, republican political ideology, and commonsense moral reasoning. As a result of this conjunction, which provided the underpinnings for the development of the most influential and widespread religiosity of the period between Revolution and Civil War, Noll argues that something akin to a "civil religion" developed in the United States, in distinctive but fundamentally related northern and southern forms.

Although Noll professes to be writing as a historian rather than a theologian, his argument is strongly shaped by his theological premises and intentions, which are consonant with the Neo-Orthodox tradition that shaped the work of such distinguished predecessors as Miller and Ahlstrom.² For Noll, Edwards remains the norm for evaluating subsequent religious thought, and Abraham Lincoln is the terminus ad quem who provides a recapitulation of Edwardsean themes in his profound analyses of the Civil War.³ Although Noll interprets that conflict as tragic rather than ironic, he implicitly draws on the thought of both Niebuhrs to make the ironic argument that the Civil War was caused, in part, by the failure of American Protestants to disentangle essential Christian belief from the cultural religion that had developed between Edwards and Lincoln at both popular and elite levels.⁴ This argument, theological as it may be, also makes for good history, and scarcely detracts from this work's considerable value. As both a survey of American religious thought and a reflection on American distinctiveness, this is animportant work for those historians who may have lost sight of the profound impact of religion on American history.