In my last post, I summarized Mark Noll’s (America’s God) belief that American evangelicals in the early 19th century generally accepted the developing free market, which brought great economic and social change to the new U.S.  I thought that Noll’s fuller explanation deserved an extended quote:

European Protestants, who for the [...]

Noll now explores the changes in American theology that came after independence.  Noll believes that the new, republican order that overturned the religious and social establishments of the colonial period needed new institutions, and the expanding evangelical churches provided just that.  See this post for my summary of his explanation.

Chapter [...]

Chapter 12 of America’s God explains the tenets of what Noll calls “American theology.”  He believes that as American evangelicals built a new culture, they also absorbed its assumptions; having torn down traditional authorities, they instead defended Christianity or their denominations with the language of republicanism and commonsense moral ideas rather [...]

Chapter 10 of America’s God discusses the cultural consequences of the rapid expansion of evangelicalism.  How, he asks, did evangelicalism come to play such an important role in the culture?

While crediting the interpretations of Gordon Wood, Robert Wiebe, and Nathan Hatch that stress the importance of the destruction of hierarchies [...]

In Chapters 7-8 of America’s God, Mark Noll shows himself to be a careful historian as he documents how traditional and “innovative” theologies did not become “American” theologies during the period of the American Revolution.  In other words, even as “commonsense” moral philosophy and republican political theory became more accepted by [...]