Religion in Colonial America, by Jon Butler, Oxford University Press, 2000, 160 pp.; $22
Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776, by Jon Butler, Harvard University Press, 2000, 320 pp.; $27.95
What “things” one can see on the Minnesota prairie that remain hidden from other mortals, Jon Butler doesn’t say, precisely. But the frontispiece quotation to his interpretive essay, Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776, should be taken seriously: “You can see things on the Minnesota praire that you can’t see anywhere else.” Emblematic clues that require reflective interpreters surface in many world religions, and meditation on this inscription can reward the reader of Butler’s latest narratives, too.
In many respects, the unrestricted vistas of Butler’s home prairie offer an apt metaphor for the imagined religious landscape he contends characterized North America even before the emergence of the first modern nation. In his view, religious concerns may have helped to shape the borders and far horizons of American nationhood, but optimism grounded in a decidedly secular, material progressivism provided the real color and texture to the canvas. The implicit teleology in his argument—his real question is Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s “What then, is the American, this new man?”—will surprise students of the early modern world. Whatever else has characterized the evolution of early American studies since the 1940s, the hard struggle to interpret that history in its own terms—and not as mere prelude to the more important “national” story—surely has been of paramount importance. But Butler now seems to be retrieving aspects of that earlier view. In the end, he is really interested in the rational, progressive (and surprisingly areligious) society that he believes paved the way for 1776 and beyond.
Butler is not guilty of reconstructing a narrative of national political triumph. Indeed, he pays commendable attention to the literatures on African and Native American religions, arguing that multicultural and relativized truth claims characterized the “New World” from the very first years of trans-Atlantic and Pacific contacts. Butler explicitly rejects a large historiography dominated by the work of John Murrin and other historians who have argued for an “hourglass” vision of North American settlement. In that account, although early attempts at transplanting microversions of Europe or Britain failed, over the course of the eighteenth century, North America nonetheless became, in political, social, economic and religious life, more strikingly “European” or “British” than had been true in the previous century.
This approach made the American Revolution far more fascinating for being neither inevitable nor under anyone’s final control, especially in its later implications. Butler does not share this view. Neither is he much concerned with the rise of the market and consumerism, nor with the invention of a liberal politics from a quasi-deferential social and political past, the questions that have characterized, in different ways, T. H. Breen’s or Gordon Wood’s synthetic views of the early American story.
Butler’s fascination is reserved for “American society,” described as an essentially “modern” enterprise. Surprisingly, his chapter titles never conclude with “society” as such, but examine “peoples,” “economy,” “politics,” and “things material” before finally turning to “things spiritual,” appropriately almost an afterthought. The concerns that shape his narrative reflect the progressive idealism of his native Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party. He concludes that both Britain and the mainland colonies were “modern,” but America trumped the game by coming down solidly in favor of the “rights talk” of autonomous individuals, to use Mary Ann Glendon’s felicitous phrase.
Yet Butler is uncomfortable with claiming too much modernity and backtracks at the end of his book, admitting that “the modernity that had emerged in America between 1680 and 1770 influenced but did not determine the Revolution. Eighteenth-century America was far from wholly new.” What kept it old was the absence of individual autonomy for women and non-Europeans in general, coupled with the persistently dependent quality of the American economy, a colonial pattern that would not be transcended until the early decades of the nineteenth century.
The American Revolution for Butler was perhaps not inevitable, but almost so, because colonists committed to material comfort and expansion reacted sharply to the stupidity of British policymakers who wanted the colonies to shoulder their part of the imperial debt contracted in the Seven Years’ War. The protest against unjust taxation sprang from the “artisans, laborers, and farmers” and received added impetus from the crisis of western expansion and resultant conflicts with American Indian cultures. Not surprisingly, Butler feels that “religion’s role in shaping the Revolution is easily exaggerated.”
In sum, Butler provides classic progressive historiography. The Revolution, like eighteenth-century American society in general, he writes in Religion in Colonial America, “was a profoundly secular event,” and it’s a good thing too.
Religion in Colonial America is a volume in the Oxford series, Religion in American Life, which is aimed principally at a secondary school audience, though others will surely make use of it as well. (Butler and Harry Stout are coeditors of the series.) From this volume readers will learn how America became the liberal, multicultural icon of modernity. The illustrations are superb, but Butler’s commendably wide reading on both the varieties of Christianity and the religions of Africans and American Indians could have produced a more challenging conclusion for younger folks than touting the importance of “diversity” and the First Amendment’s tolerance of “differences.”
Many readers of Books & Culture may recognize Butler’s arguments, but for others a brief synopsis of his work and the changing face of the historiography of early American religion may prove helpful. Butler came to national notice in the 1970s through the publication of several provocative shorter essays, most notably one that denied the very existence of that much-interpreted eighteenth-century revival known as the Great Awakening, which purportedly transformed the American religious landscape into an “evangelical” topography. This revisionist essay preceded by a few years another in which he insisted that a largely illegitimate elite Christianity inherited from the “imposed” state church traditions of Europe dominated the Protestant experience in colonial British America.
These writings took account of Catholic scholarship in Europe that dramatized the “popular” versus “elite” schematization of European religious life. But Butler refrained from commenting on French or Spanish Catholicism in the New World, and only briefly alluded to African or American Indian religions. He devoted more attention to these issues in Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Harvard Univ. Press, 1990), concluding that the truly transformative “evangelical” character of modern, Protestant America took shape in the “hothouse” of nineteenth-century revivalism.
More recently, Butler has conceded cautiously that pietism, revivalism, and a renewed apocalyptic tradition stemmed from the reinvigoration of Christianity in the eighteenth century. Yet this brief success of institutional Christianity in America, he believes, foundered because of the absence of “physical coercion to support the church, and equally important, persistent suppression of dissent.”[1] For Butler, the eighteenth century remains interesting as a field of conflict between the emerging “rational” claims of modernity versus an internalized, popular form of “real” spirituality that (in his view) repeatedly threatened to derange American social and political stability.
Those who have followed the trajectory of Butler’s work will find little that is new in the two books under review. Or, perhaps even worse, they will discover that Butler’s assessment of pre-1776 America looks here even more insubstantial than in his 1990 account. While Butler continues to argue for a suppressed but vital popular African religion, others have pointed to the remarkably rapid Christianization of enslaved peoples, all the more surprising given the indifference of many European Christians to the plight of Africans even when they begged for spiritual support and attention to the brutality of their circumstances. Butler’s fixation on a more “authentic” but forcibly suppressed, subterranean African religious tradition fits his generally negative view of “official” Christianity in any of its guises. Yet, the persistence of African rites surrounding healings, burial customs, and “magic” does not look all that different from what eighteenth-century European clergy often reported about some of their charges.
Butler’s revisionism has laudably forced the careless cheerleaders for “evangelical” or “Christian” America to explain why statistical measurements of church membership reveal a relatively low percentage of population in the eighteenth century, and why membership steadily climbed in the nineteenth and twentieth as direct government involvement or protection of specific religious traditions declined. Yet membership statistics are notoriously difficult to interpret, and interpretive nets must generally be cast wider in order accurately to assess the depth of popular commitment to any religious persuasion. If one acknowledges that in percentage terms the United States is still statistically “Christian”—even in the twenty-first century—the varieties of this faith deserve more specific attention than being subsumed as one among so many competing forms of American “spirituality.”
More important, Butler’s arguments reconfirm his progressive liberal endorsement of Jefferson’s famous “wall of separation” letter. The lesson Butler seems most intent on disseminating is his singular interpretation of the First Amendment: we were never better off than we are now, having rigorously decoupled private spirituality from political or social policy. Contemporary worries about a secular, pagan society are misplaced because that’s what colonial society itself always largely was.
It may be perverse to suggest a radical counterperspective, but an alternative vision, even in brief, may help to illuminate how much is at stake in the problematic nature of Butler’s argument. Suppose, therefore, he has it all wrong.
First, Butler’s interpretation of early America depends heavily on a picture of disorderly popular spirituality being held down, dominated, or controlled by elite traditionalist religions. But this picture inadequately reflects the most recent writings on early modern Atlantic societies and faith, including North America.
Although measuring the “genuineness” of faith commitments is always hazardous, the sheer numerical significance of Roman Catholicism in North America today, for example, surely cannot be explained away by references to “imposed” Christianity. A Christian body both numerous and since, the 1960s, including Native American, Hispanic, and African American clerics and hierarchs, fits oddly into Butler’s vision of a triumphant “modernity” having successfully cast off a repressive institutional faith. The eighteenth-century arrival of Russian Orthodox missionaries in Alaska did not produce the same numerical results, but indigenous response to this liturgically and doctrinally rigorous form of Christianity seems equally hard to square with his vision of how “modernity” and belief have intersected in North America.
The predominant historiography of early modern European Christianity has long utilized a shopworn paradigm of “official” religion and its coercive imposition upon a long-suffering populace. Though ancient in origin, this notion received renewed vigor from the Reformation, which endorsed a discontinuous view of history and adopted as its self-image a primitive, restorationist view of “true” Christianity. Dissenters from this tale, especially the British historian Eamon Duffy, have marshaled imposing counterevidence for pre-Reformation England, arguing that attention to liturgical and paraliturgical rituals reveals how much the conventional story, whether written by the Reformation’s apologists or their later rationalist critics, missed about the religious convictions of ordinary mortals.[2]
Some will object that both Orthodox and Roman versions of Christianity are exceptions to the Protestant norm that shaped Christianity’s trajectory in North America. But more recent scholarship suggests that many Protestant Europeans, even after the Reformation, continued to rely upon practices and rituals that Reformed theologians found noxious and did their best to eradicate. That this happened should surprise us no more than should the persistence of African or Native American rituals among Christianized members of those cultures.
Butler’s exhaustive reading acknowledges the real growth spurt enjoyed by the Church of England in the three-quarters of a century before the imperial crisis. Yet his interpretive scheme really cannot account for the popularity of traditional, ritualist forms of Protestant Christianity among Africans, American Indians, or Europeans. Both in rural New England, and in the colonies where the Church of England enjoyed some kind of weak establishment, its disabilities actually paralleled those of the established church in England itself in the eighteenth century: insufficient numbers of buildings and clerics to keep up with popular demand. Nor was this pattern confined to Anglophone communities. While German speakers encountered a different form of the Reformation than that which convulsed England, Scotland, Wales, and eventually, Ireland, attempts to eradicate Catholic lay piety foundered especially among conservative Lutheran villagers. Well into the eighteenth century, many versions of the Lutheran Mass would have been harder to distinguish from the Roman than from Reformed services, down to the presence of images, Latin texts, and paraliturgical lay pieties.[3]
If one turns to these continental settlers in North America, both the successful establishment of Reformed and Lutheran synodical structures by the mid-eighteenth-century and an extraordinary planting of hundreds of their congregations coupled to the impressive accomplishments of the Moravians among Europeans and the Delaware reflect more than a triumph of “heartfelt religion.” Rather, one can discern here the appeal of churches that successfully emphasized liturgy and ritual and thereby managed to appeal across cultural and “racial” lines. Among the Swedes, for example, the apparent early success of a Moravian minister who initially lured nearly half his Lutheran flock away depended upon his claim of Lutheran ordination. His appeal collapsed suddenly when he was confronted with a demand to produce the letters from Upsala and to explain why he increasingly departed from celebrating the Lutheran liturgy according to accepted, traditional forms.[4]
Moravians gave a very good impression that they were a church, a distinction they enjoyed when the British Parliament recognized them as such in 1748; they proudly denied that they were “dissenters.” It was exactly the public face of a noble church that made them so attractive, with clerics wearing gowns and bands, performing a solemn liturgy, introducing the most impressive instrumental and choral musical performances in eighteenth-century North America. They understood the dramaturgy of worship and that the church was expected to be able to present such a public face. That they, like their Roman and Orthodox counterparts, were capable of subsuming selective aspects of African or American Indian rituals and ceremonies into their theological structures is only now beginning to attract the attention of scholars.
Too often, historians of Christianity in early America have emphasized the importance of charismatic preaching or successful appeals to the heart. But the appeal to eye and ear better allows us to appreciate why the importation and reconstruction of an organ at Philadelphia’s St. Michael’s Lutheran Church in 1751 provoked a huge increase in attendance. Similarly, the emergence of trained choirs and the procession of Lutheran clerics at the regular meetings of that body’s synod confirmed in the popular mind that this was a real church. The renewal of these liturgical churches in the eighteenth century should not have occurred if “modernity” was omnipresent; here the evidence clearly contradicts Butler’s assessment of secularity and a “private” and internalized “spirituality.”
Second, Butler can be queried about the picture of African Americans and Native Americans simply suffering under the imposition of a “foreign” faith. No one denies that colonization and Christianization often marched hand in hand. But even among Protestant Moravians and Anglicans by the 1750s, and increasingly thereafter among Methodists and, later, Baptists, Native American, and African groups seized Christianity as their own religion. These people successfully interwove inherited cultural forms to doctrine in ways not all that dissimilar from the manner in which Europeans had integrated an ancient faith of Middle Eastern roots to their tribal ways.[5]
There are two indices, both quite ancient, that have marked the trajectory of Christian churches, both of which are deeply relevant to Butler’s views about early American society and Christianity. Both, I think, are relevant to the issues of Native American and African American religious belief and practice; both are missing from Butler’s vision.
The first of these markers is depth of religious commitment in the face of suffering and persecution. Thomas Jefferson believed that the tree of liberty should be watered every so often by the blood of revolution. In writing this, he merely reprised Tertullian’s observation, “the more often we are mown down by you, the more in number we grow. The blood of Christians is seed.” Seen in this light, the robust “orthodoxy” of American Indian and African American Christians who have perished repeatedly, and unjustly, in the Americas may be one of the most vital indicators of whether “true Christianity” was planted long ago in North America, and worked upon the social conscience of “modern” society.
The second marker is charity. Early pagan reports to the Roman authorities identified Christians as peculiarly inclined to harbor orphans, and widows, and to engage in acts of charity on behalf of the poor. It was this quality, as one report noted, that suggested that “something divine” attached itself to these people.
Butler’s account of religion in American society misses entirely the roots of this marker of religious behavior. Statistically, North Americans, beginning in the colonial era, created a tradition of charitable, private benevolence unmatched anywhere in the world. The best studies of philanthropic giving now suggest that giving as a percentage of disposable income has fallen steadily in the past generation, marking the decay of mainline Christian denominations. Those most willing to tithe and to give of their substance are found today as they long have been, among the poorer Christian groups. The percentage of Roman Catholics in the U.S. population, for example, remains more or less stable only because of the influx of devout but poorer Hispanic immigrants whose giving patterns on behalf of coreligionists do not seem to be departing very much from the pattern earlier immigrant groups exhibited.
Indeed, Butler’s vision of the long secular and “modern” past cannot really account for the continued impact of religious belief upon contemporary American society. In a “modern” society where non-Christian groups may account for no more than 6 or 7 percent of the population willing to identify themselves with some religious ideology, America remains in some vaguely “spiritual” fashion identifiably “Christian.” And rather than diluting the influence of religious commitment, continued high levels of immigration will produce more populations attached to “traditional” religions—especially Roman and Orthodox Christ- ianity and Islam—replete with ritual liturgies capable of subordinating individual quests for spiritual life to conservative values of family and religious community.[6]
Butler, of course, is not entirely unaware of this. He worries about what might happen to secular pluralism if too much religion—especially a revitalized evangelical Protestant or Catholic Christianity—insisted on having a say in shaping modern society instead of remaining safely quietistic and therefore socially and politically irrelevant.
But why should Butler worry? After all, if his historical analysis is right, the progressive liberals can reasonably relax. If the roots of Christianity in North America were already so shallow in “modern” society before 1776, a secular future seems assured. Evangelicals tend to worry that the Yale historian is right; secular progressives are afraid at times, as Butler himself seems to be, that he might be wrong.
Both the future course of “religion”and the quality of Christianity in North America remain deeply controversial topics. Historians agree neither about the nature of society nor about the quality and nature of religious belief during the past 300 years. Both for those who fear that secular diversity and tolerance are under assault, and for those who fear that “traditional” Christianity has no future, one might borrow a final piece of folk wisdom from Jon Butler’s prairie home: don’t bet the farm.
A.G. Roeber is head and professor of early modern history and religious studies at Penn State University, where he is also co-director of the Max Kade German-American Research Institute. He is the author of Palatines, Liberty, and Property: German Lutherans in Colonial British America (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press), which received the John H. Dunning Prize from the American Historical Association.
1. See Roeber, “The Problem of the Eighteenth Century in Transatlantic Religious History,” pp. 115-138, for a more extensive review of Butler’s historiographic lineage; the citation here is to Butler, “The Spiritual Importance of the Eighteenth Century,” pp. 101-114 at 110; both in Hartmut Lehmann, Hermann Wellenreuther, and Renate Wilson, eds., In Search of Peace and Prosperity: New German Settlements in Eighteenth-Century Europe and America (Penn State Univ. Press, 2000).
2. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (Yale Univ. Press, 1992), p. 2: “the liturgy was in fact the principal reservoir from which the religious paradigms and beliefs of the people were drawn.” See especially his chapter 8 on “Charms, Pardons, and Promises: Lay Piety and ‘Superstition’ in the Primers,” pp. 266-298. For Orthodoxy in America, see for example Sergei Kan, “Recording Native Cultures and Christianizing the Natives: Russian Orthodox Missionaries in South-Eastern Alaska,” in Richard P. Pierce, ed., Russia in North America (Limestone Press, Kingston, Ontario, 1990), pp. 298-313.
3. For a review of the literature and issues, see Roeber, “Official and Nonofficial Piety and Ritual in Early Lutheranism,” Concordia Theological Quarterly, Vol. 63 (April 1999), pp. 119-143.
4. On the Swedish incident, see John Fea, “Ethnicity and Congregational Life in the Eighteenth-Century Delaware Valley: The Swedish Lutherans of New Jersey,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic History (forthcoming). See also Evan Haefeli, “The Origins of American Religious Freedom: Reformation Politics in the Middle Colonies, 1628-1720,” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2000.
5. See for example Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1998).
6. Butler could well retort that the traditional, ritualist religious groups now arriving in North America will prove incapable of resisting the corrosive effects of a modern society driven by mass consumption, not religious conviction.
NOTE: For your convenience, the following books, which were mentioned above, are available for purchase: • Religion in Colonial America, by Jon Butler • Becoming America, by Jon Butler
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