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"The Almighty has His own purposes." Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural, quoted approvingly by Steven Keillor in this challenging and wide-ranging book, provides salutary food for thought for Christian historians as well as for statesmen. At a period of extensive Christian influence in public life, the opposing armies in the Civil War had read the same Bible and prayed to the same God, but there had been no easy victories, and the nation had inflicted upon itself a terrible and fratricidal slaughter.
It is the great merit of Keillor's overview of American history that he neither ducks hard questions nor reiterates comforting myths, while at the same time he argues tenaciously for the validity of a Christian vision of the past, in which God is neither absent nor capricious. His analysis extends over five centuries, from the 1490s to the 1990s, from Columbus to Clinton, and is informed by the prospect of Christ's return as the "one sure, final, unchangeable event." His account is undergirded by familiarity with the historical scholarly literature and a clear and consistently expressed theological position. He provides a robust defense of Christianity against the argument that it is invalidated by its negative historical record; he argues that oppression, patriarchalism, slavery, civil war, and rampant capitalism occurred in America in spite of Christianity rather than because of it.
According to Keillor, the early settlement of the Americas occurred at a time when European Christianity had become dangerously corrupted and attenuated. Even though the Reformation was to address these problems, it could not remove them. Colonizers and traders might bring the Christian gospel, but the majority of them were themselves in rebellion against God. The failure to adhere to divine standards of justice was apparent initially in the dispossession of native peoples, and was subsequently compounded by the acquisitive capitalist dynamic inherent in the slave trade and the development of the plantation system. Nevetheless, despite human sin, Christ was made known to the exploited New World and to the oppressed slaves.
Meanwhile, Keillor points out, the Puritan founders of New England crossed the Atlantic as "poor exiles of Christ," with no aspirations to found utopia. (In his view, John Winthrop's "City upon a Hill" is "the most misused quote in American history.") Stable, religiously integrated Christian societies developed over time. By the eighteenth century, however, things began to go wrong: links between church and state corrupted the purity of the gospel and forced an accommodation to the ambivalent faith of children who lacked the clear-cut conversion experience of their parents.
Keillor sees the Great Awakening as an outpouring of divine grace that inspired Christians but also increased religious pluralism, and it thereby indirectly contributed to the growing secularization of politics. The American Revolution and the Constitution were products not primarily of Christian influence but of "Enlightened" secular republicanism, and the subsequent drive westward was fueled by patriarchal, acquisitive, male individualism. Subsequent revivals stemmed from the further autonomous action of God's Spirit in redeeming an undeserving and unprepared people.
Despite the aspirations of antebellum evangelicals to reform the nation, simmering conflict finally led to the horrific bloodshed of the Civil War. Keillor points to an underlying rejection of Christian principles by politicians on both sides. God used the conflict, Keillor suggests, to spark revivals and to end slavery, but—like the children of Israel—Americans quickly forgot their hard-earned lessons, indulging in an orgy of unbridled capitalism and consumerism. Even so, God continued to bring good out of evil. The extension of American influence across the Pacific not only satisfied imperialistic appetites but also enabled missionary enterprises that advanced the fulfillment of God's ultimate purposes for the world.
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