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
andincisive 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.
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