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America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln
by Mark A. Noll
Oxford Univ. Press, 2002
656 pp.; $35

A generation ago, Sydney Ahlstrom and Sidney Mead led two schools of American religious historians in contention. In the landmark A Religious History of the American People, Ahlstrom told a story that dealt with American diversities more expansively than had any other. At the same time, he brought a distinctive focus to his lifework. He saw the American religious story as being in many ways the plot of New England Puritanism writ large. The Yale master devoted only a few pages to the religion of the Enlightenment, of "the Founders." When he finished his story, as Puritan influence waned in the tumults of pluralism, he thought America was, in a way, losing its way, or its plot.

Sidney Mead, meanwhile, who devoted himself early on to the New England theologies—he wrote a major work on Nathaniel William Taylor, for instance—when he turned synoptic and synthetic, saw the Puritan and then evangelical story as being one of relative irrelevance. America's real religion, which he called "the religion of the republic," informed American institutions and even set the boundaries for the free expression of religion that the "sects" enjoyed. His lifework hinged on precisely the elements Ahlstrom slighted. As he finished his story after the turmoil of the 1960s, many were questioning whether much integrity survived in that Republican religion or what Robert N. Bellah was then defining as "civil religion."

Let Mead frame the contention from his point of view with words first published in 1964:

Recognition that the theology undergirding the practice of religious freedom has always been in conflict with the distinctive theology of right-wing Protestantism enables one to diagnose Protestantism's present sickness as a psychosomatic indigestion, resulting from an inability either to digest the theology on which the practice of religious freedom rests or to regurgitate the practice. I am told that an animal that cannot regurgitate can be killed by getting it to accept as food something it cannot digest. I do not think Protestantism can give up the practice of religious freedom which it has accepted. Therefore, I conclude, if it cannot learn to digest the theory on which such freedom rests, the prognosis cannot be a happy one.1

Mead did not confine the meanings of his Republican religion to the account of how it helped assure religious freedom. This faith provided him with a canopy under which he saw housed almost the whole range of texts, interpretations, myths and symbols, rites and ceremonies, which made up national religious life. And by "right-wing" he did not mean far-right faith communities. In Mead's schema, virtually all of the varieties of denominational Protestantism that have been and continue to be the preference of a majority of Americans were boxed in and described as self-defensive sects that either practiced duplicity or suffered indigestion that could prove fatal.

A third of a century later, both the religion of the republic ("God Bless America") and evangelical Protestantism flourish, and they do so in close alliance, even and maybe especially on the political level. How account for their ability to coexist and indeed cooperate? America's God, by Mark Noll, as impressive and potentially influential a work of history in its field as we have seen since the generation of Ahlstrom and Mead, provides subtle and learned discernments for all who have tried to make sense of what Mead always called "America's Two Religions."

Today no single historian can dominate the way the Sydney/Sidney tandem could, because the domains historians address are too diverse and the perspectives scholars bring to their stories are too particular, too conflicted. Among them are those who would dismiss Noll's achievement as a too-late concentration on an old "mainstream," while now most concern is for "marginal" religion. Noll's is intellectual history, admittedly fused with social-contextual nuance, but still history of thought "from the top down." This means we read here mainly of New England professors and parsons, not accounts of impressed seamen, yeoman farmers, or spinners and weavers. Noll generously stretches to find and make reference to women, African Americans, and others previously overlooked in histories like his, but sources for developing their stories on the scale and with the scope he needs are simply not there. Other groups that Noll has treated elsewhere in his massive corpus find it hard here to make their way into his plot.

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