Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People

Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (1990)
By Jon Butler

Synopsis: Butler argues that we should focus less on the importance of Purtinanism in shaping American religion, and more on religious eclecticism. Argues that Europe failed to transfer a coherent religious structure to the U.S., and while the U.S. Anglican movement sought to sacrilize the landscape, it didn't really have any authority. The slave trade caused a holocaust of African religious systems, and put a new spin on Christianity, ultimately making it more dichotomous. It was the massive expansion of denominations and the increase of pluralism that allowed religion to really keep going in the U.S., and not the Puritan homogeneity that others have argued. "In the post-1680 Anglican renaissance, the renewal of Christian denominational authority, the effects of the African spiritual holocaust, the shifting of the old colonial church-state relationship, and the further development of highly volatile antebellum mixtures of popular supernatural views, the American religious tradition was born and reborn" (290). The push to make the U.S. seem Christian since day one actually came later, when people were seeking a sense of authority.

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Provides somewhat of a counternarrative to books on Puritans - esp. Perry Miller (Errand into the Wilderness), and most Sacvan Berkovitch stuff. Those books put Puritanism at their center, and viewed this as the trope that would always continue through American character, whereas this book says, uh, this place has always been religiously eclectic and pluralistic.