Awash in a Sea of New Books about American Christianity

AWASH IN A SEA OF NEW BOOKS ABOUT AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY George A. Raw/yk Nathan 0. Hatch. The DemocratizationofAmerican Christianity.New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. xiv + 312 pp. Illus. Jon Butler. Awash in a Sea of Faith: ChristianizingtheAmericanPeople. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. xii + 360 pp. Richard T. Hughes and C. Leonard Allen. Illusionsof Innocence:Protestant Primitivismin America, 1630-1875. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988. xviii + 296 pp. Ted Ownby. Subduing Satan:Religion,Recreation,and Manhood in theRuralSouth, 1865-1920.Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. xii + 286 pp. Illus. Nancy Taton Ammerman. BaptistBattles:Social Changeand ReligiousConflictin the SouthernBaptist Convention. New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press, 1990. xv + 388 pp. J. William Frost. A PerfectFreedom:ReligiousLibertyinPennsylvania. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. x + 221 pp. In recent years, the contours of American historiography, especially for the post-Revolutionary period, have been profoundly reshaped by a number of influential studies dealing with important aspects of the evolving religious experience in the new Republic. In particular, there has been an extraordinary outburst of critical yet empathetic books and articles which attempt to come to grips with the forces of change and continuity that are to be found at the heart of the American Evangelical experience. Writing about Christianity, even about the Evangelical tradition, is no longer considered to be an act of academic suicide. With the neo-Marxist working-classhistorians very much on the defensive, and with many intellectual historians battered by self-doubt and deconstructionalism, scholars interested in American religious history have rushed into the publishing and intellectual void. They have certainly been encouraged by publishers who realize that Christianity is still a very vibrant force in the United States. 474 George A. Rawlyk Modernization and secularization apparently have not destroyed American Christianity--despite the prophetic utterances of a myriad of scholars in the past and the present. In fact, it may effectively be argued that the United States is a more Christian country today than it was 200 years ago--at the beginning of the so-called Second Great Awakening. A variety of pollsters have discovered, for example, that one in three Americans has had a "conversion experience"; in the South, one in two. Contemporary neoconservatism in the United States may owe as much to this fact as it does to supply-side economics or the Hollywood charisma of a Ronald Reagan. The continuing power of American Christianity, especially its Evangelical variant, has not gone unnoticed by a growing number of historians, who have been eager to trace its roots back to the Revolution and beyond, but always from a sophisticated social and cultural historical perspective. It is not surprising, therefore, that a number of astute observers of contemporary American historical writing have stressed that the best work now being done is probably in the area of religious history, especially in the history of the late-eighteenth, and nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For many in the field, Nathan Hatch's prize-winning The Democratization of American Christianity is the best of the best. According to Hatch, the 1780s and 1790s,in particular, were years of dynamic social and cultural ferment when basic republican and democratic values began to permeate all aspects of American life. Hatch contends that much of American Christianity was democratized during the latter part of the eighteenth and early decades of the nineteenth century, as hundreds of ordinary Americans became important and influential actors on the religious stage and hundreds of thousands of other men, women and children responded enthusiastically to their often conflicting interpretations of Evangelical Christianity. It was a time when traditional structures of reality were collapsing and many Americans saw no compelling reason to accept traditional distinctions which had marginalized them into what was widely-perceived as a subservient and vulnerable status. During the decades immediately following the American Revolution, popular Evangelical Christianity seemed to be in a delicate state of religious tension, tightened like a steel spring by the powerful contradictory forces warring within it. There was a kind of mystical quality, but also a secular one; a democratic bias but also an authoritarian tendency; a revelatory emphasis and an empirical thrust; and an obsession with individualism and also a tendency...