Introduction: ASCH Panel on Mark A. Noll, America's Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794–1911 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 864 pp., $39.95 hardcover

Abstract

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.