The Search for a Rational Faith: Reason and Belief in the History of American Christianity

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Daniel K. Williams (Associate Professor, Associate Professor, Ashland University)

The Search for a Rational Faith

Reason and Belief in the History of American Christianity

Daniel K. Williams (Associate Professor, Associate Professor, Ashland University)

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Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

Oxford University Press Inc
19 November 2025

History of religion; Protestantism & Protestant Churches; Christian theology

The Enlightenment and Darwinism posed threats to traditional Christianity. So why have so many highly educated Americans remained committed believers?

The Search for a Rational Faith challenges popular theories of secularization with a sweeping 400-year history of Anglo-American Protestant defenses of the Christian faith. Through a detailed study of the arguments of those who found Christian faith compatible with Enlightenment reason, Daniel K. Williams explains why Christian faith has continued to remain a viable intellectual option in the United States even for educated people who accept modern science. From the seventeenth-century New England Puritans who founded Harvard College to the twentieth-century university professors who believed that Christian theism was the only viable grounding for morality in the atomic age, faith and reason have been an integral part of the Anglo-American experience. This book chronicles that story. It is a story that intersects with the spiritual lives of well-known figures such as Isaac Newton, John Locke, John Adams, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Martin Luther King Jr., all of whom wrestled with the question of the reason to believe. It is the story of Christian apologists who crafted intellectually sophisticated defenses of the faith. And above all, it is the story of the development of an idea-the idea that there is a rational basis for Christian belief.

This book shows how that idea was transmitted from England to America in the seventeenth century and how it continued to develop and transform over the next four centuries in response to the Enlightenment, Darwinian evolution, historical criticism of the Bible, new theories of religious epistemology, and the ethical challenge of the civil rights movement. The Search for a Rational Faith is the story of what that idea meant in the past and what it still means today, in a new era of secularization.

By: Daniel K. Williams (Associate Professor Associate Professor Ashland University)
Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9780197748039
ISBN 10: 0197748031
Pages: 464
Publication Date: 19 November 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Introduction Chapter 1: Puritan Arguments against Atheism Chapter 2: Arminianism and the Search for an Evidence-Based Faith Chapter 3: Refuting Deism Chapter 4: American Calvinists'Discovery of Christian Evidences Chapter 5: A Republic Founded on Christian Evidences Chapter 6: The Capstone of the Antebellum College Curriculum Chapter 7: The Challenge of Science and Biblical Criticism in the Antebellum Era Chapter 8: Natural Theology's Encounter with Darwin Chapter 9: The Liberal Protestant Apologetics of Experience Chapter 10: The Search for an Evangelical Apologetic Chapter 11: The Last Appearance of Liberal Protestant Christian Apologetics Chapter 12: The Resurgence of Christian Apologetics among Evangelicals Appendix: What about Catholic Apologetics? Glossary

Daniel K. Williams is a historian of American religion and politics who is currently an associate professor of history at Before coming to Ashland University, he was a professor of history at the University of West Georgia. He is the author of several books on religion and politics in the United States, including God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right and Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement before Roe v. Wade. His articles on American Christianity and conservatism have appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Christianity Today, and the Washington Post.