AMERICA’S GOD: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln

This book was published by Oxford University Press, London, in 2002 containing five parts of discussions: (1) Introductory, (2) Synthesis, (3) Evangelization, (4) Americanization, and (5) Crisis

Coment

This book is more strengthening my knowledge about the landscape map of pre-20th century religion because this book tries to historically present more comprehensively about the existence of religion in America. Here, Noll explicitly says that religion had taken a very important role in American ever since the colonial era until Abraham Lincoln’s era in nineteenth century. What was model of the religion? Noll told us that the religion developing and influencing any facets of American’s lives was Protestant, more precisely, the Calvinist theology or the evangecalism as what was mentioned also by Holifield. Indeed, the influence of the religion was huge. The Americans’ lives were all led by their religiosity. Alexis de Tocqueville, therefore, suprised in his visit when looking at this condition by saying: “On my arrival in the United States it was the religious aspect of the country that first struck my eye...Among us, I had seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom almost always move in contrary directions”. He further said in other part of this book that religion had been grossly influencing the political life of the United States. 

However, Noll sees that the American religiosity, especially the religious thought and theology, has shifted from European theological traditions, descended directly from the Protestant Reformation, toward a Protestant evangelical theology decisively shaped by its engagement with Revolutionary and Post-Revolutionary America. The changes took place from the 1730s to the 1860s. Those facts, according to Noll, were part of a general shift within Western religiou life. Western Protestantism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was moving from the establishment forms of religion, as found out in traditional, organic, premodern political economies, to individualized and affectional forms, adapted to modernizing, rational, and market-oriented societies. In other words, borrowing Holifield’s thesis, the theology was more rationalized and practical in accordance with the individuals’ understanding i.e., for instance, the physical world created by God was more likely to be regarded as understandable, progressing, and malleable than as mysterious, inimical, and fixed. In general terms, the essential sites of religion became intersting issues to be discussed and debated. The pluriformity of theology emerged. This condition was more strongly supported then by the fact of gender, race, and region coloring the social and political events in America. With these facts, starting from the eighteenth century, American theology was very different from the ones in Europe.

Above all, Noll recognized that the fact of Christian theologies in America in the early eighteenth century were quite similar to Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, but interestingly by the mid-nineteenth century, theology in England was in some ways drawing closer to theology in America, especially because of the vigorous evangelical movements inside and outside the Church of England that paraleled similar movements in North America. Here, the synthesis in Christian theology or thought came out predominantly that were Protestantism, republicanism, and commonsense principles.

Quotations

This book is a contextual history of Christian theology. Its pages describe evolutionary changes in Christian doctrine that occurred from the 1730s to the 1860s, a period when theology played an extraordinary important role in American thought, but the emphasis throughout is on the contexts – ecclesiastical, social, political, intellectual, and commercial – in which those changes took place. (p. 3).

The book’s main narrative describes a shift away from European theological traditions, descended directly from the Protestant Reformation, toward a Protestant evangelical theology decisively shaped by its engagement with Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary America (p. 3).

The changes taking place in America religious thought from the 1730s to the 1860s were part of a general shift within Western religious life (p. 3)

Western Protestantism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was moving ffrom the establishment forms of religion, embedded in traditional, organic, premodern political economies, to individualized and affectional forms, adapted to modernizing, rational, and market-oriented societies (4).

Theological manifestations of these changes can be described in several ways. They first reoriented specific beliefs: God was perceived less often as transcendent and self-contained, more often as immanent and relational. Divine revelation was equated more simply with the Bible alone than with Scripture embedded in a self-conscious ecclesiastical tradition. The physical world created by God was more likely to be regarded as understandable, progressing, and malleable than as mysterious, inimical, and fixed. Theological method came to rely less on instinctive deference to inherited confessions and more on self-evident propositions organized by scientific method (p. 4).

Theological changes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also involved a shift in meaning for key concepts that operated in both religious and political life, for example, ‘freedom’, ‘justice’, ‘virtue’, and ‘vice’ (p. 4).

A word, indeed, is necessary about the central placce of evangelicalism in this narrative. For the period under consideration the most widely recognized religious voices for the American public were Protestant. From the 1790s and with gathering force in the decades leading to the Civil War, the most prominent Protestant voices were also self-consciously evangelical (p. 5).

Thus, in what follows, social and political events are enlisted to help explain grand shifts in theological conviction (p. 6).

Alexis de Tocqueville drew a telling contrast between the religious situations in France and America by referring to political circumstances: “On my arrival in the United States it was the religious aspect of the country that first struck my eye. As I prolonged my stay, I perceived the great political consequences that flowed from these new facts. Among us, I had seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom almost always move in contrary directions...(p. 6)

In the early eighteenth century, the dominant Christian theologies in America were quite similar to the dominant theologies prevailing in Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. As in colonial America, theology in these regionjs was primarily Calvinistic or Reformed or at least overwhelmingly theocentric (p. 7).

By the mid-ninneteenth century, theology in England was in some ways drawing closer to theology in America, especially because of the vigorous evangelical movements inside and outside the Church of England that paraleled similar movements in North America (p.8)

More than at the start of the eighteenth century, in other words, American theology by 1850 was distinct from theology in Protestant Europe. By contrast to Scottish and Northern Irish theologians, most Americans had moved further away from the convictions of confessional Calvinism. And by contrast to the Swiss and the Dutch, Americans, with only a few exceptions, remained more committed to the Bible and the experience of conversion as foundational religious authorities (p 8).

By the early nineteenth century, a surprising intellectual synthesis, distinctly different from the reigning intellectual constructs in comparable Western societies, had come to prevail throughout the United States (p. 9)

The synthesis was a compound of evangelical Protestant religion, republican political ideology, and commonsense moral reasoning (p. 9).

To sum up a situation that many historians now take for granted: after the 1780s, republicanism (wherever found along a continuum from classical to liberal) had come to prevail in America; very soon thereafter, commonsense principles (whether defined in elite or populist terms) were almost as widely spread; and in the same post-Revolutionary period, Protestant evangelicalism (however divided into contending sects) became the dominant American religion (p. 12).

Theology is about ideas but there can be no ideas without people, no Christian people without churches, no churches without contexts that are political, social, and culturalin nature (David Wells, in Noll, p. 439).

For religious thinkers, the parallel shift of meaning was from contemplative theocentricism to activistic anthropocentricism (p. 440).

To early republicans, liberty meant ‘the right of the people to share in the government’. ...In Edwards’s Freedom of Will, liberty meant “power, opporyunity, or advantage, that anyone has, to do as he pleases”. (p. 441)

Jonathan Edwards’ thought was more rigorously doxological than the thought of any nineteenth century religious thinker, but evangelists of that latter period did more to Christianize and civilize unchurched Americans ina afree-form liberal society than Edwards could ever have done (p. 444).

Theological debates on the issues that led to the war drew American religious thinking deeper into the intellectual patterns that had been established between the founding of the republic and the aoutbreak of armed conflict. The cultural influence of those theological habits had been extraordinary, in fact so extraordinary that even the cataclysm of total war could not completely overwhelm them. (p 445).

Written by: Dr. H. Nuriadi Sayip