Thoroughly Centered: The Reformed Tradition and American Religious History

Abstract

Historians once were blind, but now they see. Where the secularization thesis once ruled the day, the evangelical paradigm now oft holds sway. Historians both of intellectual elites and of the common folk have begun to explore the same question which participants of the H-AMREL online discussion group periodically toss about: Why are Americans so religious? Jon Butler, one of the premier historians of American religion, has recently even warned against overusing the evangelical paradigm. Thirty years ago historians would not have needed that warning; today it stands as a useful brake against the tendency to see religion anywhere and everywhere. Colonial and antebellum America have been particularly well-served in American religious history. Just to name a few, Butler, Patricia Bonomi, Harry S. Stout, Leigh Schmidt, Charles Cohen, Nathan Hatch, Richard Carwardine, and Mitchell Snay have provided provocative syntheses of colonial religion, colonial and early national revivalism, the advance of Christianization against folk traditions, the explosion of democratic religious movements in the early national period, and the complicated interplay of religion and politics in the antebellum years.' The religious history of post-Civil War America remains more of an open field. Perhaps the story of the fall lacks the same inherent drama as the story of the rise. Much recent work has focused on topics in social and cultural history. The early national period has been a particularly fruitful field for explorations of religious populism in America, which took advantage of religious disestablishment to capture plain folk who hungered for communal celebrations of religious experience. The antebellum era has also produced numerous studies of the smallest details of everyday religious experience, including artifacts in the home, charts and images of millennial predictions, hymn and prayer books, family genealogies in Bibles, popular religious fiction, and family altars.2 Sociologists of religion have asked big questions about secular