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Religion in Colonial America, by Jon Butler, Oxford University Press, 2000, 160 pp.; $22
Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776, by Jon Butler, Harvard University Press, 2000, 320 pp.; $27.95
What "things" one can see on the Minnesota prairie that remain hidden from other mortals, Jon Butler doesn't say, precisely. But the frontispiece quotation to his interpretive essay, Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776, should be taken seriously: "You can see things on the Minnesota praire that you can't see anywhere else." Emblematic clues that require reflective interpreters surface in many world religions, and meditation on this inscription can reward the reader of Butler's latest narratives, too.
In many respects, the unrestricted vistas of Butler's home prairie offer an apt metaphor for the imagined religious landscape he contends characterized North America even before the emergence of the first modern nation. In his view, religious concerns may have helped to shape the borders and far horizons of American nationhood, but optimism grounded in a decidedly secular, material progressivism provided the real color and texture to the canvas. The implicit teleology in his argument—his real question is Hector St. John de Crevecoeur's "What then, is the American, this new man?"—will surprise students of the early modern world. Whatever else has characterized the evolution of early American studies since the 1940s, the hard struggle to interpret that history in its own terms—and not as mere prelude to the more important "national" story—surely has been of paramount importance. But Butler now seems to be retrieving aspects of that earlier view. In the end, he is really interested in the rational, progressive (and surprisingly areligious) society that he believes paved the way for 1776 and beyond.
Butler is not guilty of reconstructing a narrative of national political triumph. Indeed, he pays commendable attention to the literatures on African and Native American religions, arguing that multicultural and relativized truth claims characterized the "New World" from the very first years of trans-Atlantic and Pacific contacts. Butler explicitly rejects a large historiography dominated by the work of John Murrin and other historians who have argued for an "hourglass" vision of North American settlement. In that account, although early attempts at transplanting microversions of Europe or Britain failed, over the course of the eighteenth century, North America nonetheless became, in political, social, economic and religious life, more strikingly "European" or "British" than had been true in the previous century.
This approach made the American Revolution far more fascinating for being neither inevitable nor under anyone's final control, especially in its later implications. Butler does not share this view. Neither is he much concerned with the rise of the market and consumerism, nor with the invention of a liberal politics from a quasi-deferential social and political past, the questions that have characterized, in different ways, T. H. Breen's or Gordon Wood's synthetic views of the early American story.
Butler's fascination is reserved for "American society," described as an essentially "modern" enterprise. Surprisingly, his chapter titles never conclude with "society" as such, but examine "peoples," "economy," "politics," and "things material" before finally turning to "things spiritual," appropriately almost an afterthought. The concerns that shape his narrative reflect the progressive idealism of his native Minnesota's Farmer-Labor Party. He concludes that both Britain and the mainland colonies were "modern," but America trumped the game by coming down solidly in favor of the "rights talk" of autonomous individuals, to use Mary Ann Glendon's felicitous phrase.
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