John Butler's
Awash in a Sea of Faith is a welcome revisionist history of American religion before 1865. Against a long-standing narrative of American religious decline, (the Puritans were the high point of American religion, apparently), Butler argues that religious beliefs have had an impact on American culture from the get-go, but to see them, we have to broaden our definition of religion to include multiple Christianities and multiple belief systems, including magic, the occult, astrology, that helped Americans make sense of their world. He also broadens the scope of his investigation beyond New England to include religious history in the mid-Atlantic and slave and African religions, and he replaces narratives of linear development with patterns of religious diffusion and struggles among competing Christianities and between Christianities and various occult practices, particularly in slave communities. And he carefully examines formal records, like church registers, parish and parishioner counts, and new church starts, to show that formal religious institutions have historically housed but a small fraction of Americans - and uses these numbers to spatially expand his study of religion beyond the confines of the church as well.
