Awash in a Sea of Faith

Jon Butler. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

This concise history of some of the larger themes of American religious history up to the Civil War argues that contrary to many traditional beliefs, the United States was not born Christian, nor was its path of religious development clearly founded by the Puritans--or any other singular group. Rather, the "Christianization" of the America people was a product of antebellum forces, playing out the denominational and institutional norms established in the eighteenth century.

The European heritage was less obvious and not as deeply rooted as might be assumed. Very little of the institutional or doctrinal force of European churches survived the seventeenth-century trans-Atlantic crossing. European belief had never been as devout nor deeply rooted as ecclesiastical authorities would have liked; the fact that formal church institutions--even including the Anglican church, which was theoretically the "official" church of the polity--were lacking in the colonies only exacerbated the problem.

And for African-Americans, it was even worse--Butler refers to the experience as the "African Spiritual Holocaust", because Africans lost essentially all of their religious and spiritual traditions, and were forced to deal with the trauma of slavery and dislocation without any institutional or cultural support. When African-Americans began to create social and cultural stability in the New World, they very slowly turned to Christianity, which they borrowed from Euro-Americans wholesale, only later incorporating African elements into their practices and denominations.

Antebellum reformers and denominational growth represented an American diversion from European trends away from church membership and religiosity, but it was not until after the Civil War, roughly, that American society would move towards majority (if not universal) religious participation and explicit belief. The Christianization of America took roughly three centuries to complete.