Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Studies in Cultural History)

Butler provides a historical view of American religion that attaches less importance to Puritanism as the major force in shaping the nation's religion. He emphasizes the influence of the role of authoritarian and coercive religious practices that established and advanced religious causes in America. Additionally, Butler follows the emergence of a religious eclecticism throughout the colonies. The movement of religious influence was confluential with political and economic developments to shape the colonies. The state-church religion that primarily shaped 17th and 18th century colonial America held power based on its coercion, territoriality and public ceremonialism. He asserts that the religion of the colonists originated primarily in Europe and is incomprehensible apart from understanding its European influences. Paradoxically, Butler writes that the most enduring patterns of American religion were also created and not merely inherited. Butler's chapters make the points that religious practice was not an organic evolution in the colonies. The governments were actively involved in dictating religious practices of their citizens. Dissenting beliefs and behavior were not welcome to the early colonies with the exception of Rhode Island and Pennsylvania which adopted more lenient libertine laws concerning religion. Religious practice was not standard throughout the colonies nor was it universal among the residents of the colonies. Butler also elaborates on the presence of magic and the occult in the New World of North America. Christians were militant against non-Christian spirituality, occult or magic. These were deemed to occur through diabolical means and were treated as such by the young governments and were later dismissed by children of the Enlightenment. Butler's treatment of religion and slavery reveals the contradicting tension between the doctrines of Christianity and the practice of slavery. Religion was central to the argument for or against slavery. The practices of religion in the slaveholding colonies had to deal with whether to evangelize and educate the slaves and then whether to allow whites and blacks to worship together. Butler discusses the ways that whites manipulated the Scriptures to accommodate slavery. He illustrates the effect that the slavery argument had on compromising the Christian integrity of churches, as they defended and facilitated slavery American revivalism was not a single denominational movement that sparked Christianity in the colonies. It was but another stream of religion besides the state church tradition of the establishmentarian Anglican and Congregationalists traditions. The American Revolution brought a shift in the religious landscape as Anglican ministers who supported the crown fled and as a new patriotism competed with religion or merged with it. Following the Revolution, American church leaders renewed efforts to stamp Christian values on a new independent society as a prio

In his book Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People, award-winning author Jon Butler attempts to go where few scholars have before. Diving deep into the early history of the United States, Butler provides the reader with a thoroughly detailed revisionist view of what many nowadays assume was a nation founded on strict Christian principles. Beginning his time-line with the United States' pre-colonial European heritage and extending all the way to the beginnings of the post-Civil War "spiritual hothouse," the author argues that the religious history of this particular country is one not of core Christian values but of plurality, magic and "popular religion". For Butler, "the term popular religion in this context means no less and no more than the religious behavior of laypeople. It is defined by its clientele rather than by its theology, by its actors rather than by their acts" (4). Butler's narrative places less emphasis on the oft-extolled Puritanism, and more importance on what he calls "quasi-Christian or non-Christian religious beliefs" (2). Beginning with a chapter entitled "The European Religious Heritage," Butler gives readers the historical background necessary for understanding where the religious diversity in the U.S. discussed later in the book originated. As he does in subsequent chapters, the author uses statistics and anecdotes to illustrate his point; while we like to think that it was good Christian men and women who established the United States, in reality the early settlers came from a diverse religious environment that blended church practices with the occult and saw a "fragile adherence to Christianity" among the laity (36). With that in mind, the rest of the book then goes on to present a history that many of us never knew we never knew. The remainder of the book proceeds to analyze specific themes and occurrences in the time and space of the early United States. Butler discusses the awkward localism in belief and religious practice that arose throughout the colonies. He uses documented evidence to show that not only were the laity not models of Christian behavior, but often times the preachers themselves were found to be "wicked and profane" (46). Butler also discusses the occult, specifically accounts of witchcraft within the colonies, and later in the book the rise of spiritualism. Especially interesting is his chapter on what he calls the "African Spiritual Holocaust," discussing how the African slaves religion partially survived captivity and evolved within the context of the mostly Christian south. Butler does not completely ignore the developing Christian denominations, however, and rounds out book with a discussion of their ever-growing power and presence during this time frame. It is an understatement to say that Awash in a Sea of Faith is full of previously unmentioned details. Perhaps it is also not an understatement to say that these details often become tedious for the reader

Thoughtful and scholarly, yet readable, history of religion in US history and its ups and downs.

Awash in a Sea of Faith is a book of its time. The intellectual and historiographical context of Jon Butler's revisionist history of religion in America is found in the camp that Jack Greene, Keith Thomas and David Hall have been preparing for some time now. This trend, which Butler perfects, is marked by a strong skepticism toward the influence of Puritanism in American culture, toward the major claims of American Protestantism, toward the basic dogmas of traditional American religious history and by a desire for historical and geographical egalitarianism. A pervasive skepticism is not the only component at the foundation of Butler's approach. His historical logic is partially guided by a continuous dialectic between the sacred and secular, elite and popular, the barren colonial landscape and the rise of sacred structures, orthodoxy and occultism. Considering the large and long religious historiographies in North America, Butler's approach starts with profoundly untraditional premises and assumptions. It should not surprise us, then, that Butler would arrive to untraditional conclusions. After all that is what revisionism is- to change the way we perceive history and to challenge some rusty assumptions. His main argument, that the Christianization of America came through a process of syncretism, would have not only alarmed Protestant leaders in the 19th century, but would also have worried religious historians in the 20th century. In his presentation of European Protestantism and its journey toward the America continent, Butler emphasizes occultism as a transforming force in religion and society. In doing this, he ignores the strength of the anti-idolatry Protestant movements that "cleaned out" many churches, the close relation between modern empiricism and Protestantism with its emphasis on the "Biblical evidence," and the influence of effective preaching on parishioners. Considering that the word "holocaust" in the post World Wars is related with the Nazi's massacre of the Jews, Butler demonizes American Protestantism for its missionary zeal and for its emphasis on civil obedience among the African Americans. By doing this, Butler completely disregards the humanitarian impulse in their behalf, which was equally syncretic. And by assuming that African American ideology was secular before 1760 he contradicts his conclusion that "Slavery's destruction of African religious systems in America . . . . constituted cultural robbery. . . . of the most vicious sort." If we still ignore this contradiction, his analysis of the African-American mass movement into Protestant Christianity cannot explain how would the unsophisticated African religious systems could have been a match to Protestantism and to the complex life in American Slavery.In revising the Great Awakenings Butler take luster out of these movements by emphasizing its conservatism and downplaying its egalitarianism. But here Butler's assumption falters in logic. He presumes that increase soci