Religion, Nationalism, and American Identity: Reflections on Mark Noll’s America’s God

摘要

Historian Mark Noll’s magisterial America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln was an immediate sensation when it appeared in 2002. Jon Butler, the Howard R. Lamar Professor of American Studies, History, and Religious Studies at Yale University, declared “America’s God delineates the Americanization of an Old World Protestantism with a breadth, learning, and sophistication unmatched by any other historian.” Noll describes this process of “Americanization” as consisting of a “shift away from European theological traditions, descended directly from the Protestant Reformation, toward a Protestant evangelical theology decisively shaped by its engagement with Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary America.” And Noll concludes that this American “Protestant evangelicalism differed from the religion of the Protestant Reformation as much as sixteenth-century Reformation Protestantism differed from the Roman Catholic theology from which it emerged.”This paper will argue that, notwithstanding Noll’s considerable achievement, his identification of an “American” synthesis minimizes (although it never denies) the profound sectional variations of that synthesis. In doing so, Noll downplays the ways in which two competing social formations, grounded in fundamentally different systems of social relations, prevented the synthesis from fully uniting “Americans.” The different understandings of the synthesis, like the different understandings of its central texts – the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution – reflected the chasm that separated white Northerners and white Southerners and made both groups see themselves as the true defenders of “America’s God.” Noll’s work thus both enriches our understanding of the how most white Americans differed from their European contemporaries, and simultaneously demonstrates the fundamental divide within American national identity, a divide so pronounced that only a long and bloody war could settle the question of which of the two competing national projects was “God’s America.”