Awash in a Sea of Faith
Awash in a Sea of Faith

Author: Jon Butler

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 9780674056015

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Challenging the formidable tradition that places early New England Puritanism at the center of the American religious experience, Yale historian Jon Butler offers a new interpretation of three hundred years of religious and cultural development. Butler stresses the instability of religion in Europe where state churches battled dissenters, magic, and astonishingly low church participation. He charts the transfer of these difficulties to America, including the failure of Puritan religious models, and describes the surprising advance of religious commitment there between 1700 and 1865. Through the assertion of authority and coercion, a remarkable sacralization of the prerevolutionary countryside, advancing religious pluralism, the folklorization of magic, and an eclectic, syncretistic emphasis on supernatural interventionism, including miracles, America emerged after 1800 as an extraordinary spiritual hothouse that far eclipsed the Puritan achievement--even as secularism triumphed in Europe. Awash in a Sea of Faith ranges from popular piety to magic, from anxious revolutionary war chaplains to the cool rationalism of James Madison, from divining rods and seer stones to Anglican and Unitarian elites, and from Virginia Anglican occultists and Presbyterians raised from the dead to Jonathan Edwards, Joseph Smith, and Abraham Lincoln. Butler deftly comes to terms with conventional themes such as Puritanism, witchcraft, religion and revolution, revivalism, millenarianism, and Mormonism. His elucidation of Christianity's powerful role in shaping slavery and of a subsequent African spiritual "holocaust," with its ironic result in African Christianization, is an especially fresh and incisive account. Awash in a Sea of Faith reveals the proliferation of American religious expression--not its decline--and stresses the creative tensions between pulpit and pew across three hundred years of social maturation. Striking in its breadth and deeply rooted in primary sources, this seminal book recasts the landscape of American religious and cultural history.

The Battle for the American Mind
The Battle for the American Mind

Author: Carl J. Richard

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2006-08

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 9780742534360

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The Battle for the American Mind brings together religion, politics, economics, science, and literature to present a compelling history of the American people. In this brief and entertaining book, noted historian Carl J. Richard argues that there have been three worldviews that have dominated American thought--theism, humanism, and skepticism. Theists put their faith in God, humanists in man, and skeptics have faith in neither god nor man. Each worldview has had an epoch of domination, leading to the present "Age of Confusion" where theists, humanists, and skeptics battle one another for control of American hearts and minds. By clearly explaining what Americans believed, exploring why they did so, and showing how that impacted the nation's development, Carl J. Richard presents a unique portrait of the United States--past and present.

Becoming America
Becoming America

Author: Jon Butler

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2001-12-28

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0674006674

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Multinational, profit-driven, materialistic, politically self-conscious, power-hungry, religiously plural: America three hundred years ago -- and today. Here are Britain's mainland American colonies after 1680, in the process of becoming the first modern society -- a society the earliest colonists never imagined, a "new order of the ages" that anticipated the American Revolution. Jon Butler's panoramic view of the colonies in this epoch transforms our customary picture of prerevolutionary America; it reveals a strikingly "modern" character that belies the eighteenth-century quaintness fixed in history. Stressing the middle and late decades (the hitherto "dark ages") of the American colonial experience, and emphasizing the importance of the middle and southern colonies as well as New England, Becoming America shows us transformations before 1776 among an unusually diverse assortment of peoples. Here is a polyglot population of English, Indians, Africans, Scots, Germans, Swiss, Swedes, and French; a society of small colonial cities with enormous urban complexities; an economy of prosperous farmers thrust into international market economies; peoples of immense wealth, a burgeoning middle class, and incredible poverty. Butler depicts settlers pursuing sophisticated provincial politics that ultimately sparked revolution and a new nation; developing new patterns in production, consumption, crafts, and trades that remade commerce at home and abroad; and fashioning a society remarkably pluralistic in religion, whose tolerance nonetheless did not extend to Africans or Indians. Here was a society that turned protest into revolution and remade itself many times during the next centuries -- asociety that, for ninety years before 1776, was becoming America.

God Is Back
God Is Back

Author: John Micklethwait

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2009-04-02

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 1101032413

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A landmark examination of the resurgence of faith around the globe The Editor in Chief of The Economist and its Lexington columnist show how the global rise of religion will dramatically impact our century in God Is Back. Contrary to the popular assumption that modernism would lead to the rejection of faith, American-style evangelism has sparked a global revival. On the street and in the corridors of power the authors shine a bright light on a vast yet until now hidden world of religion. Twenty-first-century faith is being fueled by a very American emphasis on competition and a customer-driven attitude toward salvation. Revealing how the religion boom is destabilizing politics and the global economy, God Is Back concludes by showing how the same American ideas that created our unique religious style can be applied to channel the rising tide of faith away from volatility and violence.

Inventing a Christian America
Inventing a Christian America

Author: Steven K. Green

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-05

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 0190675225

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Steven K. Green explores the historical record that supports the popular belief about the nation's religious origins, seeking to explain how the ideas of America's religious founding and its status as a Christian nation became a leading narrative about the nation's collective identity.

Copyrighting God
Copyrighting God

Author: Andrew Ventimiglia

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1108420516

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By using copyright in sacred texts, American religious organizations help to create, manage, and control emerging spiritual communities.

Radical Origins
Radical Origins

Author: Val Dean Rust

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 9780252029103

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Val D. Rust's Radical Origins investigates whether the unconventional religious beliefs of their colonial ancestors predisposed early Mormon converts to embrace the (radical( message of Joseph Smith Jr. and his new church. Utilizing a unique set of meticulously compiled genealogical data, Rust uncovers the ancestors of early church members throughout what we understand as the radical segment of the Protestant Reformation. Coming from backgrounds in the Antinomians, Seekers, Anabaptists, Quakers, and the Family of Love, many colonial ancestors of the church(s early members had been ostracized from their communities. Expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, some were whipped, mutilated, or even hanged for their beliefs. Rust shows how family traditions can be passed down through the generations, and can ultimately shape the outlook of future generations. This, he argues, extends the historical role of Mormons by giving their early story significant implications for understanding the larger context of American colonial history. Featuring a provocative thesis and stunning original research, Radical Origins is a remarkable contribution to our understanding of religion in the development of American culture and the field of Mormon history.

The Episcopalians
The Episcopalians

Author: David Hein

Publisher: Church Publishing, Inc.

Published: 2005-08-01

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 0898697832

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The story of Episcopalians in America is the story of an influential denomination that has furnished a large share of the American political and cultural leadership. Beginning with the Episcopal Church's roots in sixteenth-century England, The Episcopalians offers a fresh account of its rise to prominence. Chronologically arranged, it traces the establishment of colonial Anglicanism in the New World through the birth of the Episcopal Church after the Revolution and its rise throughout the nineteenth century, ending with the complex array of forces that helped shape it in the 20th century and the consecration of Gene Robinson in 2003. The authors focus not only on the established leadership of the church but also to the experience of lay people, the form and function of sacred space, the evolution of church parties and theology, relations with other Christian communities, and the evolving ministries of women and minorities.

One Family Under God
One Family Under God

Author: Anna M. Lawrence

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2011-05-05

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0812204174

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Originally a sect within the Anglican church, Methodism blossomed into a dominant mainstream religion in America during the nineteenth century. At the beginning, though, Methodists constituted a dissenting religious group whose ideas about sexuality, marriage, and family were very different from those of their contemporaries. Focusing on the Methodist notion of family that cut across biological ties, One Family Under God speaks to historical debates over the meaning of family and how the nuclear family model developed over the eighteenth century. Historian Anna M. Lawrence demonstrates that Methodists adopted flexible definitions of affection and allegiance and emphasized extended communal associations that enabled them to incorporate people outside the traditional boundaries of family. They used the language of romantic, ecstatic love to describe their religious feelings and the language of the nuclear family to describe their bonds to one another. In this way, early Methodism provides a useful lens for exploring eighteenth-century modes of family, love, and authority, as Methodists grappled with the limits of familial and social authority in their extended religious family. Methodists also married and formed conjugal families within this larger spiritual framework. Evangelical modes of marriage called for careful, slow courtships, and often marriages happened later in life and produced fewer children. Religious views of the family offered alternatives to traditional coupling and marriage—through celibacy, spiritual service, and the idea of finding one's true spiritual match, which both challenged the role of parental authority within marriage-making and accelerated the turn within the larger society toward romantic marriage. By examining the language and practice of evangelical sexuality and family, One Family Under God highlights how the Methodist movement in the eighteenth century was central to the rise of romantic marriage and the formation of the modern family.

The Perfect Rule of the Christian Religion
The Perfect Rule of the Christian Religion

Author: John Howard Smith

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2008-12-01

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1438425198

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Some thought them dangerous, others credited them with recovering original Christianity. The Sandemanians, a sect with roots in the turmoil of eighteenth-century Scottish Presbyterianism, espoused a radical theology that influenced the development of American Christianity. Founder John Glas blended elements of fundamentalist New Testament Christianity with Enlightenment philosophy to create what he believed to be "the perfect rule of the Christian religion." The history and legacy of the Sandemanians are given full attention in these pages, which reveal the origins of the sect in Scotland and follow its greatest proselyte, Robert Sandeman, across the Atlantic to New England. Author John Howard Smith shows how such a minor sectarian movement could create so much controversy at the time of the First Great Awakening and the American Revolution. The churches Sandeman established were eventually crushed by the Revolution, their adherents scattered, never to grow into a denomination. The Sandemanians are little known today, yet elements of their theology played a key role in the future of American Christianity.