This book completes the magnificent two-volume work that Mark Noll began with In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492–1783 (2016), or to say the same thing differently, it completes the trilogy of his summing-up books that he began with America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (2002). Like its two predecessors, America's Book contains capsule summaries of arguments that Noll has proffered in several of his many previous books, especially on US American evangelicalism and the Civil War. Moreover, it ranges comprehensively over the vast expanse of US American religious history in meaning-of-it-all fashion, with Noll's customary acumen. No scholar tires of the accolade “magisterial,” which Noll earned for America's God and In the Beginning Was the Word. This book completes a magisterial trilogy by lucidly, astutely, learnedly, and generously covering its waterfront, and by disciplining the entire exposition with a twofold argument that yields a third argument.

At 846 pages, Mark Noll's history of what he labels America's Protestant Bible civilization certainly has the feel of encyclopedic comprehensiveness. That this hefty volume is but the second portion of Noll's larger history of the Bible in America only adds to the sense of grand summation: the synoptic account of how the scriptures have shaped the nation—its public life, moral order, political divisions, and otherworldly hopes. It is a story filled not only with Protestant successes—the massive publishing program of the American Bible Society or the scriptural suffusion of popular hymnody and everyday devotion—but also with Protestant failures, most obviously in the way nothing-but-the-Bible moral reasoning compounded the abiding divisions over slavery. Indeed, at the end of the day, Noll presents this as a story of loss more than triumph: the decline and fragmentation of a Protestant Bible civilization that had been built amid all the contingencies of a new republic. That narrative arc carries an obvious element of regret that could certainly feed a white evangelical nostalgia for a Christian America, but that is clearly not Noll's intent. Especially on matters of slavery and race, his account is one far more of reproof than reclamation.

Mark A. Noll's insightful and comprehensive survey of the Bible as foundational to American history skillfully nuances this contested topic. While some might describe the United States as a Bible republic, Noll, in stunningly dense detail and documentation, correctly calls the nation a Bible civilization. In drawing this crucial distinction, Noll demonstrates that the Bible and Biblical literacy underlay discourse about politics, culture, and citizenship while at the same time he shows that religious neutrality was enshrined as a national norm in not privileging in the civic sphere one religion over another. After the “proprietary” churches that once exercised disproportionate influence in the public square yielded to a competitive religious marketplace, Methodists emerged in buttressing the body politic through the power of private piety. This disengagement from overt public involvements—a signature attribute of Wesleyan whites—paralleled what the American Bible Society designed in maintaining Biblical primacy in the life of the nation. Distribution of scriptures, especially on the expanding frontier, without doctrinal note or denominational advocacy would sustain the Bible as a glue holding together the American polis and sustaining this body of scriptures as “America's book.”

If a random member of the American Society of Church History (ASCH) were asked to select four individuals to go on a new Mount Rushmore of “Most Influential American Religious Historians,” I would wager that Mark Noll would make the cut pretty easily. After many years of laboring in the deep trenches of undergraduate education at Wheaton College, and then the even deeper trenches of graduate education at the University of Notre Dame, he now brings us America's Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794–1911, the second in a brace of massively researched studies of the Bible's role in American life.

Mark Noll's new book is a masterpiece. A monumental work of scholarship and erudition, America's Book merits respect for its artistry as well. The writing is lucid and well crafted. Always judicious, circumspect, and fair-minded, America's Book moves the reader right along, one page to the next, through 846 pages not counting front matter, in a story of enormous importance for understanding religion's role in American life.

For over thirty years, eighteenth-century Boston minister Charles Chauncy published his views about universal salvation outside of the printing press. While scholars have argued that he was reluctant to publish because of his heterodox views against a predominantly Calvinist public, the long history of a broadly circulating manuscript complicates any clear intentions toward privacy or secrecy. Instead, Chauncy strategized around the printing press and the pulpit. Using more discreet modes of publication, like manuscript circulation and scribal publication, he gathered a supportive public for universal salvation before his views even reached the printing press. The audience for his work grew even further through intimate conversations and private correspondence between readers of the manuscript and those they wanted to convert. By the time Chauncy decided to print his views, Congregationalist ministers’ hopes for a largely orthodox public sphere had already been compromised through various means of sharing, exchanging, and distributing ideas outside of the printing press. In many ways, it was not strictly the allure of Enlightenment ideas that facilitated the liberalization of New England theology. It was also the ways writers like Chauncy attended to different modes of publications to situate different readers as a captive and receptive audience.

This article evaluates Origen's criticism of Christian participation in the Roman army in relation to two prominent themes in his writings: the moral progress of the Christian and the role of demons in God's providence. I argue that, for Origen, to be a Christian is to be a soldier, albeit one whose adversaries are not human combatants, but the Devil and his angels. The battle is won when Christians refrain from sinning, attaining moral perfection through their study of the scriptures, and adoption of ascetic practices. By avoiding the physical battlefield, Christians remain unsullied by the passions that inflame the soldier, enabling them to fight demons more effectively. But this spiritual combat is not without risks to the physical body. As Origen's Exhortation to Martyrdom attests, execution could be the providentially ordered outcome of a Christian's combat against demons. Origen presents the violent persecution of Christians as consistent with divine providence and martyrdom as a gift of God to the church. His opposition to Christian military participation is rooted neither in a wholesale rejection of warfare nor a deep respect for embodied life, but in his concern for human moral progress—progress that could be advanced by providentially sanctioned violence.

This article examines the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) as a history of trauma for Chinese Protestant intellectuals. Using Cai Yongchun—a graduate of Yenching and Columbia University—as an example, the article aims to 1) demonstrate the overwhelming conformity demanded by the Communist regime and 2) analyze how Christians like Cai sought to align with official lines through intellectual reconstruction. In sum, the party viewed Christian intellectuals as deeply suspect due to their religious and Western affiliations, thus targeting them in successive campaigns that began in the 1950s and culminated in the Cultural Revolution. Despite state marginalization, Christian intellectuals like Cai persisted in their patriotism, eager to remain relevant even amid ideological fanaticism. Active adaptation as such, however, facilitated the hegemonic project of revolutionary subject formation that championed the Communist leadership as the custodian of truth. Cai came to experience a fundamental and perpetual denial of the self, pressuring him to become an ever more faithful follower of Mao and his words. Nevertheless, the proletarian redemption proved elusive, and the old Christian identity resilient.

For most of the years I was working on the book that has been so graciously but also insightfully critiqued by these four interlocutors, my working title was Bible Nation: From Tom Paine and Francis Asbury to Francis Grimké and Woodrow Wilson. My plot, as I conceived it, ran from Paine, who inadvertently precipitated an all-but unanimous defense of the Scriptures from a wide swath of otherwise contentious Protestants, and Asbury, who did so much to promote “the Bible alone” in the population at large, to Wilson, who championed the Bible in almost exclusively civil religious terms, and Grimké, who—though a Presbyterian—sustained the earlier African American alteration of apolitical Methodist piety to include what Dennis Dickerson has aptly called “an egalitarian/evangelical thrust.”

Scholarly accounts of the violent events that occurred early in Cyril of Alexandria's episcopal tenure rely most of all upon Socrates's Ecclesiastical History, Damascius's Philosophical History, and John of Nikiu's Chronicle. In contrast, Cyril's own corpus is almost never consulted or engaged by scholars working on these topics, which has resulted in the complete neglect of certain passages that are directly relevant to these well-known events. Surprisingly, on at least three occasions Cyril explicitly rejects religiously motivated violence, while, in contrast, in two other passages he theorizes about it in positive terms as a means of protecting the integrity of communal boundaries. The analysis of these passages reveals that, in certain works, Cyril employed a violent rhetoric that plausibly contributed to creating the environment that resulted in Hypatia's murder. In contrast, however, he seemingly shifted his rhetoric at a certain point in his career, going out of his way to disavow precisely the kind of actions with which he is usually associated, perhaps doing so as a response to Hypatia's horrific death. With these complementary insights, this study contributes to the growing scholarly interest in how violent rhetoric can lead to actual violence. Moreover, Cyril's disavowal of religious violence complicates the simplistic image of him that holds sway as the dominant interpretation of his legacy among scholars of late antiquity.

Scholars have acknowledged that there is a systemic aspect to Catholic clerical sex abuse that acts as a type of grammar structuring behaviors and responses. Feminist critics in particular stress the patriarchal nature of the abuse that connects bishops, priests, and boys together. This essay argues that in addition to public systems dominated by men, there are also private structures that facilitate abuse. Using the extensive primary documentation assembled by BishopAccountability.org, I focus on the space of the home and the unique orientations of mothers and fathers to better understand the dynamics of clerical sex abuse in the American Catholic church. The essay begins with the abuse of a Milwaukee priest who tormented his parishioners from 1945 until his forced “retirement” in 1970. Drawing on themes found in this case, I examine other abuse narratives—focusing on how the Catholic understanding of alter Christus and mid-twentieth-century gender roles made the “good Catholic home” a particularly vulnerable place for abuse. Since public and private systems overlap, it is essential that the domestic aspects of clergy sex abuse also receive a full analysis.

At the turn of the twentieth century, an enchanted response to Christianity among minority peoples on China's ethnic frontiers in Southeast Asia caught Western missionaries by surprise. This paper explores the historical circumstances and the dynamics of the mass Christian conversion among those hill peoples. Far from a cultural defeat and a grudging surrender to a conquering foreign faith, their embrace of Christianity was an exuberant, communal rush toward fulfillment of indigenous prophecies of redemption. Unlike the civilizing project of the modern state—a coercive mandate of assimilation and ideological transformation—the Christian movement offered them a choice and allowed them to channel their desperate prophecies of the past toward a reformist messianism. With its war on local shamanism, rituals of courtship, and inherited (and often inebriated) rhythms of ethnic life, Christian conversion was ostensibly a break with indigenous traditions. However, it also ironically fortified the ethnic identities of the peripheral peoples—especially through the creation of the written script for the purpose of Bible translation—and generated fresh resiliency for their material and cultural survival.

This article explores the experiences of black people who accepted the teaching of William Miller that Christ would return to the earth in 1843–1844. Heretofore, black Millerites have been almost completely ignored in the substantial historiography of Millerism, millennialism and apocalypticism, and black religion. In this article, I argue that the black experience in Millerism deserves to be studied because it articulates the central concerns of blacks at a critical juncture in antebellum America. I show that enslaved and free blacks embraced Miller's doctrine because of the failure of America, particularly its politics and churches, to provide them the basic human right of freedom. As they did in the Christian churches they joined during the Awakenings, blacks fashioned Millerism in their image, using it for purpose, empowerment, expression, community, and liberation. This exploration of black Millerites contributes to broader discussions on the motivations of marginalized people who gravitate toward the eschatological and the impact the apocalyptic has on real-world engagement.

The 1648 Cambridge Platform, Congregationalists’ first, guided New England Congregationalist church practice well into the next century. Yet the synodical deliberations that shaped the platform remain largely a closed book. Were the contents of all three preparatory platform drafts known, a baseline could be established for inferring those deliberations. But it has long been taken as a given that John Cotton's draft is missing.

The now-recovered draft was, among other things, Cotton's vehicle for working reforms restraining Congregationalism's democratic and fissiparous tendencies into the Cambridge Platform. He had first laid out those reforms in Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven (1644), a book that attracted widespread attention, including at the English Westminster and Savoy Assemblies. Yet the slender amount of scholarship on the Cambridge Platform has offered, at most, generalized acknowledgment, if any, of Cotton's considerable and complicated impact on it. That neglect leaves a large gap in our understanding of the platform, the synod, and Cotton himself, as well as of the unstable dynamics of clerical authority in an awkwardly peripheral emergent puritan church movement that emphasized lay empowerment.

In the Papal States of the end of the sixteenth century, most female monasteries were mendicant. In doing so, nuns violated many rules of the XXVth session of the Council of Trent: they obviously did not respect enclosure, but also were unable to survive only thanks to their real estate properties, as stated by the chapters 2, 3, and 16 of the De Regularibus et Monialibus decree. This financial situation of convents was addressed for the first time by Clement VIII (1592–1605), who led a broad economic reform all over his territory. How was the economic reform of convents led by Clement VIII applied in the local realities of the Papal States, what were its impacts on nuns, and how did they react to these changes? Based on the letters received by the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars in Rome during the Pontificate of Clement VIII, this article addresses the materiality and the local peculiarities of the economic reform of female convents in the dioceses of the Papal States, highlighting the strategies used by nuns to fight against change, negotiate accommodation, or adapt their daily lives to the new Roman requirements. Much less known and studied than the Tridentine enclosure, the economic reform desired by the same Council of Trent is an equally important change whose impacts durably transformed the daily life and identity of nuns.

Nineteenth-century Cherokee printers were media theorists who made political arguments through the materiality of Christian tracts. This article turns to the tract Poor Sarah as an illuminating example, especially because Cherokees published it in two editions in 1833 and 1843, affording a comparative analysis from before and after the tribe's forced removal from Cherokee Nation to Indian Territory. The material qualities of the two editions were strikingly different. Before removal, Cherokee printers emulated Anglo-Protestant prototypes in terms of dimensions, layout, and typography. The goal was to increase the likelihood of staying on their lands by winning white patrons and nudging Cherokee readers to see themselves as acculturated reading subjects. After removal, Cherokee printers rethought acculturation as a strategy. They redesigned Poor Sarah to turn away from white audiences and instead address the Cherokee community and its needs. Attention to the evolving materialities of Poor Sarah reveals Cherokee Christian printing as a key site of Indigenous media theory and part of Cherokee Nation's repertory of political action in response to US imperialism and settler colonialism.

In the contested spiritual economy of the early nineteenth century, recently disestablished American clergymen consolidated themselves in theological seminaries. Members of the dominant New England Congregationalist and Presbyterian ministries, these seminarians organized a defensive front against itinerant, populist rivals by intensifying their curricula, proscribing physical exertion as a distraction from study, and shielding clerical students from popular influence. Yet critical voices from within the seminaries soon reported that unrelenting study damaged students’ bodily health and alienated the clergy from a laity on whom their educational funding now depended. Accompanying such critiques were proposals for an alternative pedagogy that gained its fullest expression in the manual labor school, where physical vigor was enshrined as a complement to theological training and where barriers separating clergy from laity were minimized. By situating the infirmities that seminarians logged in memoirs and exposés alongside their efforts to reform the seminary system, this article argues that the graduate clergy mustered a coherent, forceful response to the crisis in spiritual leadership that disestablishment precipitated. The article presents clerical elites not as casualties of democratization or as agents of capital, but as self-aware and self-interested economic actors in the reordering of American religious authority after disestablishment.

In this article, I invite the guild to rethink received paradigms and perspectives in the study and teaching of American church and religious history. The common additive approach of the last decades that folds in Latino/a experience usually reflects new themes of contemporary immigration and diversity, but rarely considers constitutive contributions to foundational stories or is conscious of perspectival constraints. In the spirit of previous ASCH presidential addresses, the proposed introspection weighs the cost of the refractions, redactions, and omissions. Through a reconsideration of seminality—whether agential or textual—in Spanish colonial expansion (Esteban of Azamor), in the Puritan colonial imaginary, and in Latino/Latin American Pentecostal growth, and of anachronistic geographical boundaries in the case of New Mexico curate Antonio José Martínez, this address calls for greater clarity in our understanding of the variegated contours of Americana church history.

In 1870, disestablishment suddenly turned the Church of Ireland from a state church into a democracy, governed by its “parliament,” the General Synod. The empowerment of the laity left it with a distinctive, indeed unique, feature among the churches of the Anglican communion—a set of disciplinary canons designed to exclude high-church ritualism from its worship. Passed in 1871, these canons, the most radical of which included a ban on the use of the cross, were used by evangelical pressure-groups to prosecute high-church clergy in the church courts. For the dominant low-church lay party, determined to defend the “Reformation heritage” of the Church of Ireland, they represented an essential bulwark against the threat of English high-church ritualism and a “slide towards Rome.” For many clergy and bishops, anxious to allow for a broader range of Anglican churchmanship, the canons unduly narrowed and impoverished the worship of the Church of Ireland. Because of the General Synod's majority voting mechanism, efforts to amend the canons proved fruitless. It was only in 1964 that the ban on the cross was removed, and not until 1974 that the canons as a whole were revised, ending over a hundred years of contention and division.