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Yet Butler is uncomfortable with claiming too much modernity and backtracks at the end of his book, admitting that "the modernity that had emerged in America between 1680 and 1770 influenced but did not determine the Revolution. Eighteenth-century America was far from wholly new." What kept it old was the absence of individual autonomy for women and non-Europeans in general, coupled with the persistently dependent quality of the American economy, a colonial pattern that would not be transcended until the early decades of the nineteenth century.
The American Revolution for Butler was perhaps not inevitable, but almost so, because colonists committed to material comfort and expansion reacted sharply to the stupidity of British policymakers who wanted the colonies to shoulder their part of the imperial debt contracted in the Seven Years' War. The protest against unjust taxation sprang from the "artisans, laborers, and farmers" and received added impetus from the crisis of western expansion and resultant conflicts with American Indian cultures. Not surprisingly, Butler feels that "religion's role in shaping the Revolution is easily exaggerated."
In sum, Butler provides classic progressive historiography. The Revolution, like eighteenth-century American society in general, he writes in Religion in Colonial America, "was a profoundly secular event," and it's a good thing too.
Religion in Colonial America is a volume in the Oxford series, Religion in American Life, which is aimed principally at a secondary school audience, though others will surely make use of it as well. (Butler and Harry Stout are coeditors of the series.) From this volume readers will learn how America became the liberal, multicultural icon of modernity. The illustrations are superb, but Butler's commendably wide reading on both the varieties of Christianity and the religions of Africans and American Indians could have produced a more challenging conclusion for younger folks than touting the importance of "diversity" and the First Amendment's tolerance of "differences."
Many readers of Books & Culture may recognize Butler's arguments, but for others a brief synopsis of his work and the changing face of the historiography of early American religion may prove helpful. Butler came to national notice in the 1970s through the publication of several provocative shorter essays, most notably one that denied the very existence of that much-interpreted eighteenth-century revival known as the Great Awakening, which purportedly transformed the American religious landscape into an "evangelical" topography. This revisionist essay preceded by a few years another in which he insisted that a largely illegitimate elite Christianity inherited from the "imposed" state church traditions of Europe dominated the Protestant experience in colonial British America.
These writings took account of Catholic scholarship in Europe that dramatized the "popular" versus "elite" schematization of European religious life. But Butler refrained from commenting on French or Spanish Catholicism in the New World, and only briefly alluded to African or American Indian religions. He devoted more attention to these issues in Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Harvard Univ. Press, 1990), concluding that the truly transformative "evangelical" character of modern, Protestant America took shape in the "hothouse" of nineteenth-century revivalism.
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