America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln

Religious life in early America is regularly compared with the flame and-brimstone Puritanism best encapsulated by the religious philosophy of Cotton Mather. However, by the nineteenth century, American religious philosophy had moved significantly far from the extreme European customs straightforwardly dropped from the Protestant Reformation, of which Puritanism was in the United States the most compelling. In its place emerged an independently American arrangement of convictions. In America’s God, Mark Noll has composed an account of this new American ethos. In the 125 years going before the flare-up of the Civil War, religious philosophy assumed a remarkably vital job in American open and private life. Its development profoundly affected America’s self-definition. The progressions occurring in American philosophy amid this period were set apart by elevated otherworldly internal quality, another trust in individual reason, and a mindfulness to the monetary and market substances of Western life. Strikingly set in the social and political occasions of the age, America’s God is packed with the figures who made up the early American scholarly scene, from scholars, for example, Jonathan Edwards, Nathaniel W. Taylor, William Ellery Channing, and Charles Hodge and religiously enlivened authors, for example, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catherine Stowe to predominant political pioneers of the day like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. The commitments of these scholars joined with the religious recovery of the 1740s, frontier fighting with France, the expending battle for autonomy, and the ascent of outreaching Protestantism to frame a typical scholarly coinage dependent on a rising republicanism and conventional standards. As this Christian republicanism insisted itself, it permeated in committed Christians a conviction that the Bible upheld their convictions over those of all others. Unfortunately, this feeling of religious reason set the phase for the Civil War, as the conviction of Christians both North and South that God was their ally served to develop a split that would before long sever the youthful country in half. Imprint Noll has given us the authoritative history of Christian religious philosophy in America from the season of Jonathan Edwards to the administration of Abraham Lincoln. It is an account of an adaptable and inventive religious vitality that after some time produced a directing national belief system the inheritances of which stay with us to this day.