Rethinking the Decline of a Bible Civilization

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.