Protestantism, American style

America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. By Mark A. Noll. Oxford University Press, 602 pp., $35.00.

The least-understood period in American religious history has been the era of the American Revolution. Most professors, ministers and laypersons could, of course, readily assemble some facts about religion and the Revolution. We might, for instance, comment that founders like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson leaned toward a tolerant deism, favoring religion that cultivated the moral life of citizens but reproving the seeming incivility of doctrinal debate and exclusivism. We stumble, however, when asked to describe the broad currents of religious energy that were moving people and churches during this period. We lack a narrative.

Mark A. Noll, who teaches at Wheaton College, offers just such a narrative by making the Revolutionary era the hinge for a sweeping history of America Protestantism from the 1730s to the Civil War. By identifying the Revolutionary period as a crucial transition he also provides fresh interpretations of what are arguably the two best-understood periods of American religious history: the Great Awakening of the 1740s, with its preeminent preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards, and the antebellum period, with its revivals, benevolent societies and burgeoning denominations. Both take on a new aspect when viewed in the light of the theological and institutional issues that faced the churches of Revolutionary America. Noll's book is a notable achievement in narrative history, and is made even more persuasive by the prodigious research that undergirds each step of the argument as well as by the comparative judgments that situate the American experience in the larger transatlantic world.