This is a brieview given personal time constraints. I finally made it around to this much-lauded text. Butler writes a controversial but compelling story of the process of making America Christian. He challenges a lot of traditional ideas (the Puritan legacy, Puritan coherence, the persistence of early African spiritual traditions, the existence of the two Great Awakenings as coherent periods, the "great Christian past" of America) and does so in a way that will draw complaints of revision and liberalism, but I think he does so in an intriguing and well-documented way.

Certainly each generation recasts history in its own image, and it's not surprising that a relatively recent work on American Christianity would explore issues of pluralism and diversity, ideas about the conflict between notions of Republicanism and Democracy and various aspects of institutional Christianity. Having said that, I think each generation has something to offer an understanding of the whole human family, and I rather enjoyed his work.

In his descriptions of several American syncretic movements (early Methodists, resurgent African American Christianity, spiritualists, and chez nous, the Saints of the Latter Days) he spends a few pages glancing off Mormon history, largely by reference to Quinn's Magic. Within his overall framework of the interactions of lay occultism, magic, astrology, spiritual fatalism, and actual institutional Christianity, I think his picture of the early Mormon church is useful. This approach does open up some parallels with other groups trying to navigate the spiritual complexities of life in a tumultuous (dare I saw terrestrial?) environment, though it is easy to quibble with his characterization of Mormonism as inaccurate or poorly fleshed out.

While the work on Mormonism seemed superficial, the overall arc of his discussion was coherent and intriguing. In a personal, presentist vein, I thought of current attempts to boost global activity rates of 20-30% (I hear 10% but who knows?) within Mormonism. Up until the Christian explosion in the century after the Civil War, christianizing this here country of hooligans and free thinkers was a thankless and only intermittently successful task.

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Sam Brown
December 16, 2005