America's God

Abstract

Examines the emergence – and then the broad effects – of a singularly American synthesis of convictions. That synthesis of evangelical Protestant religion, republican political ideology, and commonsense moral reasoning came into existence during the second half of the eighteenth century and then exerted a telling influence on American life through the time of the Civil War. Elsewhere in the North Atlantic world, the main Christian traditions opposed both “Real Whig” republicanism and the “commonsense” principles of the era's new moral philosophy. Not so in America. Through a series of contingent circumstances – revival in the 1740s, colonial warfare with France, the struggle for independence, a great surge of evangelical denominations in the new republic, and the leadership of Protestant thought and agencies in creating a national culture – distinctly American forms of Christian republicanism and theistic common sense became the common intellectual coinage of the new United States. In turn, these patterns of thought pushed theology, for both educated elites and sectarian populists, toward greater stress on the individual, on free will, and on personal appropriation of the Bible. The very centrality of commonsense Christian republicanism also, however, set the stage for the intellectual tragedy of the Civil War – when dedicated Christians, both North and South, were convinced that the Bible supported only their own side. The story is at once a great triumph of creative theological energy and a significant tragedy of theology captured by culture.

The Difference Denominations Made: Identifying the Black Church(es) and Black Religious Choices of the Early Republic

“…David George, for example, converted in the Deep South and joined one of the first black Baptist churches in the colonies, but retained Calvinist precepts to the point that he disgusted the Arminian-inclined British evangelical governor in Sierra Leone, Zachary Macaulay. 63 Demographically, however, the comparatively large and increasing numbers of blacks in the South meant that the black Baptist faith there acquired a flavor very different from anywhere else on the English-speaking mainland. Scholars such as Mechal Sobel have uncovered powerful connections between West African culture and southern black Baptist faith.…”

Religious marketing: reflections from the other side of politics

“…Ever since the constitutional separation of church and state in 1776 (the First Amendment forbids religious establishment), a state-sponsored voluntarist (i.e. freedom of choice) principle has operated in terms of both religious and political affiliation (Moore, 1994;Warner, 1993Warner, , 1996Noll, 1990Noll, , 2003. Lacking state support, religion was forced to market itself, and a religious market evolved hand in hand with a commercial market following Independence.…”

Mark Noll Responds

“…Precisely the tragedy of Lincoln (from my angle as a Christian believer drawn to theologians like Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Barth, and von Balthasar, who have preserved God's mysterious sovereignty as an essential part of their Christian faith) was as I stated it in the book, that for Lincoln and a few other nonbelievers like Emily Dickinson, "to be faithful to the God they found in their own hearts-or in the Bible, or in the sweep of eventsthey had to hold themselves aloof from the organized Christianity of the United States and from its preaching about the message of Jesus Christ." 15 It is not my view that Lincoln gave utterance to adequately Christian theology; it is my view that, compared to the Christian theologians of his day, his vision of God came much closer to what an adequate Christian view should be than did theirs.…”

“…9 In addition, my discussion in the book of "theistic mental science" did spotlight the widespread sense, which grew especially strong after the foundation of theological seminaries and the spread of scientific professorships in the colleges, that by exploiting Baconian method for their own work the theologians had removed the threat to theology from Baconian method applied to the natural world. 10 Chronologically considered, Numbers' quotations from Charles Hodge about the struggle between science and theology were published in 1874precisely at the time when Jon Roberts has shown that America's scientists first began to accept Darwinism-which might indicate that the crisis posed by science to theology came more in the postbellum period, or at least relatively late in the antebellum period. 11 Laplace, Mill, and Comte certainly had their American readers before the Civil War, but antebellum American theologians do not seem to have been as troubled as religious leaders in Europe about the implications of their work for theology.…”