America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794–1911 by Mark A. Noll

Abstract

Noll knows a lot about the history of religion in America and frames the Bible as his protagonist in this engaging, complex, and telling account of how Protestant America became Bible-obsessed in the long nineteenth century. This massive sequel to his formidable In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492–1783 (2015) is interdisciplinary insofar as it combines the history of political rhetoric, pro- and anti-slavery arguments before the Civil War, women’s history, history of the book and publishing, African American history, and the impact of biblical criticism.Noll attends to religious movements, innovations, and organizations that embraced biblicism, but also fairly channels individuals like Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Maria Stewart, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who often were better interpreters from outside ecclesiastical precincts than the preachers who occupied the then-popular pulpits of the years from the Revolution to World War I.The net effect of Noll’s impressive synthesis of so many kinds of history is highly readable, employing thirty chapters to spotlight significant episodes, and sweeping when it comes to the topic of Protestantism. Since 1970, historians’ treatment of Protestantism in America has shifted from something passé (why study dead white people?) to a newly acknowledged monolithic force that accounts for everything old holding back an emerging diverse contemporary democratic society. Much like whiteness, therefore, Protestantism is now widely invoked but not historicized so much as summarized. Noll’s work corrects this lacuna.If his formal subject is the Bible, Noll’s greater story is how the social custodial Protestants (Congregationalists and Anglicans) lost out to the sectarian Protestants (Methodists and Baptists) who did not initially wish to run society, but only their own churches. The early national era saw most Americans becoming evangelical Bible consumers who believed that all answers could be found in the words of the scripture they fervently quoted. This worked, Noll argues, until slavery revealed that the Bible was used to support every conceivable moral position on the issue. Meanwhile, Catholics and Jews became increasingly vocal about the hegemonic use of the King James Version (kjv) in public schooling. After 1876, Americans produced a plethora of new versions of scripture to support their own religious ideas, evidencing both a diversity of faith and further fragmentation.Noll also tracks how religious consciousness shifted in the scripture passages clergy chose to memorialize American presidents upon their deaths. The shift he finds between the death of President Washington in 1799 and the assassination of President McKinley in 1901 is from biblical Hebraism, invoking the Old Testament, to a decidedly New Testament emphasis. The implication is that American Protestants went from thinking of America as God’s new Israel to comparing assassinated presidents mostly to Jesus in less than a century.By 1911, at the 300th anniversary of the publication of the kjv, the Bible was still popular and widely invoked, but the kjv itself was not nearly so central to political and social life as it had been before the Civil War. Whereas the Jesuit Catholic periodical America saw the kjv as a misattribution of genius belonging solely to the Church—its source—former president Theodore Roosevelt and future president Woodrow Wilson each proclaimed it to be the source of America’s ethics as a Christian nation. William Jennings Bryan staked out the fundamentalist position that the Bible was not to be celebrated as the work of men, but rather received as a divinely inspired book. Thus, the idea of a biblical civilization was eclipsed inside the ranks of some of the faithful and intensified among others, all while the nation’s failure to live up to biblical ideals was painfully obvious to African American observers like Ida B. Wells and Francis Grimke, who keenly saw the shortcomings of Christians like Wilson in living out their biblical ethics. This extraordinarily well-documented study is also to be commended for the interdisciplinary viewpoint it takes of the Bible as simultaneously source, object, product, crutch, problem, and still often an inspiration for Americans and their culture.