Henry Imler January 23rd, 2007

Mark Noll’s work, America’s God, was primarily concerned with showing the unique interplay that occurred between American views of religion, political theory, and ideas of knowledge. He was primarily concerned with how the latter two ideas affected the first. The account is distinguished others in that Noll attempted to show 1) how unique and unexpected this development was, and 2) the role that the development of the commonsense theory of knowledge played. Noll focuses on the dominant trends in the above categories, specifically, Protestantism, republicanism, and a commonsense, or intuitional, theory of knowledge. None of these were uniquely American developments. Whether it was Protestantism from Europe, republicanism from France, or notions of commonsense from Scotland ; each was inherited. The combination of these factors resulted in the widespread adoption of Protestantism in America. The adoption of Protestantism reversed fortunes from their decline in influence in the mid to late 1700s to an adoption rate of 85% in 1860. Noll sees Jonathan Edwards as the premier shaper of American Theology. Everyone either utilized or had to respond to his work. The great north/south schism of Evangelicalism in early parts of the 1800’s aided the national rift over slavery and was a contributing factor in America’s decent into civil war.

There were some concerns with Noll’s argumentation style and arguments. The first and least important concern was the tone that Noll sometimes used in describing historical characters. There were times when people were described in non-objective terms. For instance, there was the description of Martin Van Buren as a “conniving political hack” without qualification as to why Van Buren was being described with such terms. However, this rarely comes up in Noll’s writing. It does, however, introduce the next complaint.

There are many times when, in the course of reading Noll’s work that the reader questions exactly how Noll has come to some of his conclusions. Oftentimes when this happens, Noll has provided good endnotes that either points the reader to specific passages or to other sources to read that clear up the question. An example of this is on page 119, when Noll describes the divisions among Dutch churches. His endnote suggests several books that explain the divisions in detail.

However, despite the depth of the work and the extensive, 200 plus page notes section, there are times when the reader is left desiring more in terms of reference. An example of this is in the chapter on the construction of a new nation, where Noll asserts that, “The red-hot revivalists who had shown sinners how to be saved now were asked to advise the converted on questions of civilization.” While this sounds like a reasonable assumption and it is not my intention to deny the accuracy of the statement, it would also be reasonable to assume that the revivalists were not sought out as diviners on matters of civilization because of the young nation’s strong commitment to the separation of church and state. Again, this is not an argument against Noll’s assertion, but merely an example of where additional citation or reference is needed.

The last complaint is one of scope and distinction. At times the reader is presented with a monolithic view of Protestantism that later becomes fractured and resulting in the aiding of the nation being ripped apart by civil war. At other times throughout the book, Protestantism and its subset, Evangelicalism, is rife with examples of cross-denominational conflict and schism, reaching from the early days of the republic to the Civil War. While Noll is quite adamant in trying to toe the fine line between showing commonalities amongst the sects and demonstrating their pluralities, the reader is left wondering just where the reality on the ground did lie. In other places, the qualifications are worded in such a manner as to render the reader confused as to what extent the factors he listed affected that which he said was affected. A prime example of this is located on page 221 where Noll is discussing ideological influences on Evangelicalism (emphasis added), “The importance of [Stout, Lambert, and Breen’s] argument is to show that, quite early on, at least some Protestants in some situations eagerly embraced some aspects of the ‘the market’ but for religious rather than material ends.” After reading this, one is not sure to what extent the unknown number of Protestants embraced the unknown level of market aspects. Added clarification on the extent of the effect, the number involved, and degree to which the principles were adapted would serve the reader greatly.

Still, the work was a good representation of developments of a large variety of Protestantism, especially how the uniqueness of the American political and philosophical traditions helped to craft a unique version of Evangelicalism. There is a high level of attention to detail in the development of Protestant theology. In that aspect, the book is very valuable as a guiding reference of the development of American theology.

• Christianity , Religion
• Comments(1)