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Have believed. Here another timely work, Jon Butler’s Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (1990), provides a different sort of challenge to time-honored theses about American Puritanism. Working a much larger canvas than Bozeman, Butler quite bluntly proposes that we “attach less importance to Puritanism as the major force in shaping religion in America and more importance to the religious eclecticism that has long been prominent,” in New England as well as in the other regions of British North America (p. 2).
Further, contra those who see the Great Migration as the originary moment of the American mind, he suggests that “the eighteenth century may have left a far more indelible impression on the American religious tradition then did the seventeenth,” not because of the postmillennialism that purportedly came from the Great Awakening’s supporters but through the widespread Anglican renaissance, the “renewal of Christian denominational authority” throughout the colonies, the lamentable effects of the “African spiritual holocaust,” and the complicated evolution of the church-state relationship (pp. 2, 291). When we consider such developments in American Christianity, Butler concludes (corroborating Patricia U. Bonomi’s similar arguments in Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America [1986]), the story of religion in America after 1700 becomes one “of Christian ascension rather than declension,” of “a Christianity so complex as to baffle observers and adherents alike” (p. 2). Butler pushes us beyond New England to consider the religious experience of the colonies as a whole, and then to realize that those parts of New England ecclesiology, theology, or rhetoric we have thought so significant to or paradigmatic of the subsequent development of an American “mind” or “self” are only small parts of a much more elaborate story and really do not go far toward explaining American Christianity in the eighteenth century, not to mention public ideology in the nineteenth. Thus far I have been concerned with scholarship that focuses
Like Bozeman, Butler does not give much credence to the notion of a direct link between the Great Awakening and the Revolution via millennialism; see his “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretive Fiction,” Journal of American History, 69 (1982-83), 305-25