Awash in a Sea of Faith

Christianizing the American People

Jon Butler

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English

Harvard University Press
01 February 1992

History; History of the Americas; Church history; Cultural studies

Series: Studies in Cultural History

"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."

By: Jon Butler
Imprint: Harvard University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Edition: New edition
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm, Spine: 26mm
Weight: 422g
ISBN: 9780674056015
ISBN 10: 0674056019
Series: Studies in Cultural History
Pages: 376
Publication Date: 01 February 1992
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Professional & Vocational , A / AS level , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Acknowledgments Introduction: Religion in the American Past 1. The European Religious Heritage 2. The Crisis of Christian Practice in America 3. Magic and the Occult 4. The Renewal of Christian Authority 5. Slavery and the African Spiritual Holocaust 6. The Plural Origins of American Revivalism 7. A Revolutionary Millennium? 8. Toward the Antebellum Spiritual Hothouse 9. Christian Power in the American Republic Conclusion: Lincoln and the Almost Chosen People Notes Index

Jon Butler is Howard R. Lamar Emeritus Professor of American Studies, History, and Religious Studies at Yale University and Research Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. His books include the Los Angeles Times bestseller Becoming America and the prizewinning Awash in a Sea of Faith and The Huguenots in America. He is a past president of the Organization of American Historians.

Reviews for Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People

This is one of those rare books that historians await impatiently for years. It is also one of those rare and remarkable books that prove worth the wait. It fulfills extravagantly the promise of those pathbreaking and pugnacious articles that made magic an essential reality of the seventeenth century and the Great Awakening an interpretive fiction of the eighteenth. It is, by far, the best account we have of early American religious life, and the most radiantly original. -- Michael Zuckerman Journal of the Early Republic