What do you think?
Rate this book
America's Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794-1911
America's Book shows how the Bible decisively shaped American national history even as that history influenced the use of Scripture. It explores the rise of a strongly Protestant Bible civilization in the early United States that was then fractured by debates over slavery, contested by growing numbers of non-Protestant Americans (Catholics, Jews, agnostics), and torn apart by the Civil War.
This first comprehensive history of the Bible in America explains why Tom Paine's anti-biblical tract The Age of Reason (1794) precipitated such dramatic effects, how innovations in printing by the American Bible Society created the nation's publishing industry, why Nat Turner's slave rebellion of 1831 and the bitter election of 1844 marked turning points in the nation's engagement with Scripture, and why Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were so eager to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible.
Noll's magisterial work highlights not only the centrality of the Bible for the nation's most influential religious figures (Methodist Francis Asbury, Richard Allen of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Catholic Bishop Francis Kenrick, Jewish scholar Solomon Schechter, agnostic Robert Ingersoll), but also why it was important for presidents like Abraham Lincoln; notable American women like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Frances Willard; dedicated campaigners for civil rights like Frederick Douglass and Francis Grimk�; lesser-known figures like Black authors Maria Stewart and Harriet Jacobs; and a host of others of high estate and low. The book also illustrates how the more religiously plural period from Reconstruction to the early twentieth century saw Scripture become a much more fragmented, though still significant, force in American culture, particularly as a source of hope and moral authority for Americans on both sides of the battle over white
supremacy-both for those hoping to fight it, and for others seeking to justify it.
This first comprehensive history of the Bible in America explains why Tom Paine's anti-biblical tract The Age of Reason (1794) precipitated such dramatic effects, how innovations in printing by the American Bible Society created the nation's publishing industry, why Nat Turner's slave rebellion of 1831 and the bitter election of 1844 marked turning points in the nation's engagement with Scripture, and why Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were so eager to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible.
Noll's magisterial work highlights not only the centrality of the Bible for the nation's most influential religious figures (Methodist Francis Asbury, Richard Allen of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Catholic Bishop Francis Kenrick, Jewish scholar Solomon Schechter, agnostic Robert Ingersoll), but also why it was important for presidents like Abraham Lincoln; notable American women like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Frances Willard; dedicated campaigners for civil rights like Frederick Douglass and Francis Grimk�; lesser-known figures like Black authors Maria Stewart and Harriet Jacobs; and a host of others of high estate and low. The book also illustrates how the more religiously plural period from Reconstruction to the early twentieth century saw Scripture become a much more fragmented, though still significant, force in American culture, particularly as a source of hope and moral authority for Americans on both sides of the battle over white
supremacy-both for those hoping to fight it, and for others seeking to justify it.
864 pages, Hardcover
Published June 3, 2022
23 people are currently reading
191 people want to read
About the author
Mark A. Noll
124 books214 followersMark A. Noll (born 1946), Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, is a progressive evangelical Christian scholar. In 2005, Noll was named by Time Magazine as one of the twenty-five most influential evangelicals in America. Noll is a prolific author and many of his books have earned considerable acclaim within the academic community.
The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
, a book about the anti-intellectual tendencies within the American evangelical movement, was featured in a cover story in the popular American literary and cultural magazine, Atlantic Monthly. He was awarded a National Humanities Medal in the Oval Office by President George W. Bush in 2006.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
June 3, 2023
This is a fantastic book that would be useful for anyone interested in American history and anyone interested in American Christianity. This book follows the story of how American's used the Bible-particularly the KJV including methods of engaging culture, politics and education. What does the Bible say? How can similar people interpret the same text so differently? Many questions are raised, and answers are not always present. Interactions with the text involved Protestants, Jewish, Catholics, women, and African Americans during the period listed. Cannot recommend it highly enough on many levels-both historical and religious. I need to read his first book-In the Beginning that covers before 1794 and anticipate the sequel of this series.
April 13, 2025
Tom has begun recommending this series to everyone.
October 27, 2023
Summary: An exploration of the role of the Bible in American public life from the rise of the new country until just before WW1.
I have read Noll's work widely. And have had three classes with him in undergrad and graduate school. I am familiar with his work, and I respect him greatly. So it is not lightly that I think that America's Book I think is my favorite of his books. Part of this is that it is just masterfully done. I can't think of many books of this size that I read as voraciously. I have always appreciated Noll's writing, but this book felt more incisive, important, and better written. But as I was thinking about it as I was finishing the book, I realized that part of it was the framing of the story concerning race. Noll is not new to examining how race has impacted American religious history. He has written two books that were particularly about the role of race, God and Race and American Politics and The Civil War as Theological Crisis, but with In the Beginning Was The Word and now in America's Book, the history of American Christianity is much more intentionally the multicultural and multi-religious history of the US. The main focus of America's book is looking at the different ways over time that the Bible (primarily the KJV for most of this time) was used by different communities within the United States. So minority communities (whether it is minority religious communities or minority racial communities) are central to telling the story of the differences in how the Bible was used.
America's Book is the second in a planned trilogy. In the Beginning Was the Word looked at the public use of the Bible in North America before the American Revolution. Diversity of use was important to that story, but part of the thesis of this book is that after the revolution, there was an attempt to come together as a Bible culture. The American Bible Society (ABS) was founded early in the 19th century and became the dominant publisher, not just of Bibles, but of all books and pamphlets. (America's Book makes me want to read John Fea's history of the American Bible Society) There was a somewhat successful (depending on the region) push to get a bible in every home in the United States. The ABS was committed to publishing the KJV without notes or commentary, which prioritized the KJV (against the Catholic Douay Rheims and other translations) and was an attempt to avoid sectarian debate.
Noll sets up the main initial debate over the use of the Bible not between Catholics and Protestants (Catholics were a tiny minority initially) but between the "Custodial Protestants and the Sectarian Protestants". In Noll's conception, Custodial Protestants are those that "took for granted the comprehensive intermingling of ecclesiastical, governmental and social interests--as well as their own leading position as intellectual and moral preceptors."(p54). There was a tension between the assumptions of European Christendom translated to the United States, where some sense of religious liberty existed. As sectarian Protestants became numerically and culturally stronger, especially after the second great awakening, the common understanding of the church's role within the community fell apart, as did the bible's role. Noll is not evaluating the rightness of sectarian versus custodial Protestantism. Noll subtly points out the difference between those custodial Protestants that took responsibility for the community and those that understood their role to be, in some sense, a divine right to rule based on chosenness.
That chosenness (my term) was part of the problem that arose as the discussion over slavery became more prominent. Slavery was the largest but not the only cause of the fracturing of how the Bible was used. As he points out in The Civil War as Theological Crisis, the Civil War broke more than just the legal entity of the United States, it was a theological fight as well. The other main fractures around the use of the Bible were its use in public schools and how Americans understood their self-conception. Early Americans saw themselves broadly as Christian and centered around a Protestant identity, which used the KJV as a rhetorical, literary, and cultural touchstone, but there was always more diversity than what that identity could hold. Noll has three successive chapters in the middle, all titled "Whose Bible?" that look at how Catholics, Lutherans, Jews, Native Americans, Women, and other naysayers were not content with the status quo identity as a Protestant KJV-only social identity.
I listened to America's Book on audiobook as I read Karen Swallow Prior's Evangelical Imagination. The main point of her book is that Evangelicals have a social imaginary. Although many Evangelicals have not explored the social imaginary, their conception of how the world works matters to how they perceive the world around them. Prior suggests that Victorian Age culture has impacted the social imaginary of Evangelicals because that was the era when Evangelicalism originally arose. Prior is primarily pointing to British Victorian culture as she explores the social imaginary of modern Evangelicals, but Noll is exploring American Christians, and it is easy to see her point in the history that Noll is laying out. One easy example is that proslavery Christians largely could not conceive of a valid biblical argument for abolition. In my post about Evangelical Imagination, I shared a quote from America's Book where Noll points out that proslavery Christians could only conceive of abolitionist biblical arguments as either heretical readings or as abolitionists reading into the scripture that did not exist. While I do not love this article because of the way it centers Russell Moore as if he is saying something new (or even as if this were new for him), Christians rejecting Jesus' own words because of the way they are interpreting them politically, is a good modern example of the social imaginary that Prior is pointing out.
In discussing the changes in how the Bible was used in the post-Civil War era, we must talk about figures like Robert Dabney. This is because he is a good exemplar of the role that overtly Christian call for white supremacy played, but also he is an example of the turn to biblicist reading against the modernist turn in the understanding of the Bible. Noll does not note this, but Dabney is still recommended by John Piper, the Gospel Coalition, and other conservative evangelicals because of his commitment to the Bible. But Dabney's commitment to the Bible was a commitment to a type of bible reading that upheld overt white supremacy. (Again, this is a place where the social imaginary impacts biblical use and understanding.) Joel McDurmon has a good section in his book about the role of Christianity in slavery, discussing Dabney's post-Civil War support of white supremacy.
Returning again to reading America's Book in light of Karen Swallow Prior's Evangelical Imagination and Andrew Whitehead's American Idolatry, and while Noll does not make judgments about whether people like Dabney have distorted Christianity to the extent that they have ceased to be Christian, Dabney is an example of why Michael Emerson speaks about the need to distinguish between Christianity and a "Religion of Whiteness." I do not know where the line should be drawn exactly, but the evidence throughout America's Book is that Christianity is not perfectly malleable; at some point, cultural influences on Christianity have changed it so much that it ceases to be Christianity. That is part of what the discussion around Christian Nationalism is about. Andrew Whitehead leans toward identifying Christian Nationalists as Christian (I think in part as a rhetorical tool to draw people toward a better Christianity.) And Michael Emerson leans toward rejecting the Christianity of those he thinks have started following a different religion. Both make good cases for their own choices.
The value of reading America's Book is to give historical grounding to the discussion of what it means to be a Christian in the US now. We can see that people have regularly used and misused Christianity and the Bible for political purposes, to enforce cultural purity, and for power in the past. Those more culturally distant uses may be easier to see than current examples. But when your social imaginary includes the type of history that Noll shares here, you are better prepared to follow Jesus.
This was originally posted on my blog at http://bookwi.se/americas-book/
Link to other reviews mentioned here: American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church by Andrew L. Whitehead https://bookwi.se/american-idolatry/
The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis by Karen Swallow Prior https://bookwi.se/evangelical-imagina...
I have read Noll's work widely. And have had three classes with him in undergrad and graduate school. I am familiar with his work, and I respect him greatly. So it is not lightly that I think that America's Book I think is my favorite of his books. Part of this is that it is just masterfully done. I can't think of many books of this size that I read as voraciously. I have always appreciated Noll's writing, but this book felt more incisive, important, and better written. But as I was thinking about it as I was finishing the book, I realized that part of it was the framing of the story concerning race. Noll is not new to examining how race has impacted American religious history. He has written two books that were particularly about the role of race, God and Race and American Politics and The Civil War as Theological Crisis, but with In the Beginning Was The Word and now in America's Book, the history of American Christianity is much more intentionally the multicultural and multi-religious history of the US. The main focus of America's book is looking at the different ways over time that the Bible (primarily the KJV for most of this time) was used by different communities within the United States. So minority communities (whether it is minority religious communities or minority racial communities) are central to telling the story of the differences in how the Bible was used.
America's Book is the second in a planned trilogy. In the Beginning Was the Word looked at the public use of the Bible in North America before the American Revolution. Diversity of use was important to that story, but part of the thesis of this book is that after the revolution, there was an attempt to come together as a Bible culture. The American Bible Society (ABS) was founded early in the 19th century and became the dominant publisher, not just of Bibles, but of all books and pamphlets. (America's Book makes me want to read John Fea's history of the American Bible Society) There was a somewhat successful (depending on the region) push to get a bible in every home in the United States. The ABS was committed to publishing the KJV without notes or commentary, which prioritized the KJV (against the Catholic Douay Rheims and other translations) and was an attempt to avoid sectarian debate.
Noll sets up the main initial debate over the use of the Bible not between Catholics and Protestants (Catholics were a tiny minority initially) but between the "Custodial Protestants and the Sectarian Protestants". In Noll's conception, Custodial Protestants are those that "took for granted the comprehensive intermingling of ecclesiastical, governmental and social interests--as well as their own leading position as intellectual and moral preceptors."(p54). There was a tension between the assumptions of European Christendom translated to the United States, where some sense of religious liberty existed. As sectarian Protestants became numerically and culturally stronger, especially after the second great awakening, the common understanding of the church's role within the community fell apart, as did the bible's role. Noll is not evaluating the rightness of sectarian versus custodial Protestantism. Noll subtly points out the difference between those custodial Protestants that took responsibility for the community and those that understood their role to be, in some sense, a divine right to rule based on chosenness.
That chosenness (my term) was part of the problem that arose as the discussion over slavery became more prominent. Slavery was the largest but not the only cause of the fracturing of how the Bible was used. As he points out in The Civil War as Theological Crisis, the Civil War broke more than just the legal entity of the United States, it was a theological fight as well. The other main fractures around the use of the Bible were its use in public schools and how Americans understood their self-conception. Early Americans saw themselves broadly as Christian and centered around a Protestant identity, which used the KJV as a rhetorical, literary, and cultural touchstone, but there was always more diversity than what that identity could hold. Noll has three successive chapters in the middle, all titled "Whose Bible?" that look at how Catholics, Lutherans, Jews, Native Americans, Women, and other naysayers were not content with the status quo identity as a Protestant KJV-only social identity.
I listened to America's Book on audiobook as I read Karen Swallow Prior's Evangelical Imagination. The main point of her book is that Evangelicals have a social imaginary. Although many Evangelicals have not explored the social imaginary, their conception of how the world works matters to how they perceive the world around them. Prior suggests that Victorian Age culture has impacted the social imaginary of Evangelicals because that was the era when Evangelicalism originally arose. Prior is primarily pointing to British Victorian culture as she explores the social imaginary of modern Evangelicals, but Noll is exploring American Christians, and it is easy to see her point in the history that Noll is laying out. One easy example is that proslavery Christians largely could not conceive of a valid biblical argument for abolition. In my post about Evangelical Imagination, I shared a quote from America's Book where Noll points out that proslavery Christians could only conceive of abolitionist biblical arguments as either heretical readings or as abolitionists reading into the scripture that did not exist. While I do not love this article because of the way it centers Russell Moore as if he is saying something new (or even as if this were new for him), Christians rejecting Jesus' own words because of the way they are interpreting them politically, is a good modern example of the social imaginary that Prior is pointing out.
In discussing the changes in how the Bible was used in the post-Civil War era, we must talk about figures like Robert Dabney. This is because he is a good exemplar of the role that overtly Christian call for white supremacy played, but also he is an example of the turn to biblicist reading against the modernist turn in the understanding of the Bible. Noll does not note this, but Dabney is still recommended by John Piper, the Gospel Coalition, and other conservative evangelicals because of his commitment to the Bible. But Dabney's commitment to the Bible was a commitment to a type of bible reading that upheld overt white supremacy. (Again, this is a place where the social imaginary impacts biblical use and understanding.) Joel McDurmon has a good section in his book about the role of Christianity in slavery, discussing Dabney's post-Civil War support of white supremacy.
Returning again to reading America's Book in light of Karen Swallow Prior's Evangelical Imagination and Andrew Whitehead's American Idolatry, and while Noll does not make judgments about whether people like Dabney have distorted Christianity to the extent that they have ceased to be Christian, Dabney is an example of why Michael Emerson speaks about the need to distinguish between Christianity and a "Religion of Whiteness." I do not know where the line should be drawn exactly, but the evidence throughout America's Book is that Christianity is not perfectly malleable; at some point, cultural influences on Christianity have changed it so much that it ceases to be Christianity. That is part of what the discussion around Christian Nationalism is about. Andrew Whitehead leans toward identifying Christian Nationalists as Christian (I think in part as a rhetorical tool to draw people toward a better Christianity.) And Michael Emerson leans toward rejecting the Christianity of those he thinks have started following a different religion. Both make good cases for their own choices.
The value of reading America's Book is to give historical grounding to the discussion of what it means to be a Christian in the US now. We can see that people have regularly used and misused Christianity and the Bible for political purposes, to enforce cultural purity, and for power in the past. Those more culturally distant uses may be easier to see than current examples. But when your social imaginary includes the type of history that Noll shares here, you are better prepared to follow Jesus.
This was originally posted on my blog at http://bookwi.se/americas-book/
Link to other reviews mentioned here: American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church by Andrew L. Whitehead https://bookwi.se/american-idolatry/
The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis by Karen Swallow Prior https://bookwi.se/evangelical-imagina...
April 8, 2024
I loved the early chapters of this book. I thought I was enjoying the author’s take on history and the power of the inspired Word. That led me to recommend the book with some enthusiasm to several people. But it turns out that I was simply rejoicing in the joy of the Second Great Awakening, particularly the Methodist focus on Biblical authority. I even appreciated how the author brought out their deviations from traditional Protestantism, such as their platforming of women as preachers. As I forged on though, I started to notice something. Many prominent strong traditional Protestant or Evangelical preachers of this era are strangely missing or downplayed. With any history, the author must make choices about who to include and what movements to exclude. It became clearer, the farther I got, that the author’s showcased voices were anyone who was not a traditional Protestant. The reader is left on their own to determine how those voices diverged with traditional doctrines.
Somewhere in the middle of the book, I finally looked up the author and learned why I would disagree with his take on how the Bible was obeyed or disobeyed in the past. That is when I learned that he is a progressive evangelical teacher at a Catholic University. Along the way there were hints of a woke-leaning understanding of history as well. That helped me make sense of many of the biases I didn’t quite get before.
My biggest disagreement with it though is with the complete lack of acknowledgement of the power and authority of Scripture. While the author writes about the influence of the Bible it is treated mostly as any other book of philosophy applied to public policy. The authority it has as God’s inspired Word is completely missing. The eternal message of salvation from sin is completely missing also. The author seemingly fails to grasp the personal importance of Scripture in his focus on the public. He fails to see that the Bible became less prominent, not as people argued over its application, but as they rejected its Author. It was all very sad.
So, once I had read it, I had to go back and un-recommend it to those that I had so enthusiastically recommend it to before. I wouldn’t recommend it to you either.
Somewhere in the middle of the book, I finally looked up the author and learned why I would disagree with his take on how the Bible was obeyed or disobeyed in the past. That is when I learned that he is a progressive evangelical teacher at a Catholic University. Along the way there were hints of a woke-leaning understanding of history as well. That helped me make sense of many of the biases I didn’t quite get before.
My biggest disagreement with it though is with the complete lack of acknowledgement of the power and authority of Scripture. While the author writes about the influence of the Bible it is treated mostly as any other book of philosophy applied to public policy. The authority it has as God’s inspired Word is completely missing. The eternal message of salvation from sin is completely missing also. The author seemingly fails to grasp the personal importance of Scripture in his focus on the public. He fails to see that the Bible became less prominent, not as people argued over its application, but as they rejected its Author. It was all very sad.
So, once I had read it, I had to go back and un-recommend it to those that I had so enthusiastically recommend it to before. I wouldn’t recommend it to you either.
December 25, 2025
I confess a certain amount of disappointment with this book. I had read some of Mark Noll’s earlier, shorter works with pleasure. I quailed at the size of this volume when I received it but hoped it would be strong enough to sustain nearly 700 pages of text. Alas, it is not so. I might make a fine textbook for a special class in American Religious History but is often so detailed as to drive the casual reader, even one with seminary training, to distraction. I found myself skipping large chunks of chapters, looking for introductory ideas and summations. Such passages were welcome: well-written and informative. But the sheer bulk of the book suggests a serious case of overwriting and, indeed, such is the case. Noll’s prose is occasionally labored as well. I considered giving the book a 2-star review but finally decided on three stars for the learning experience in many chapters and the good summation in the epilogue. Recommended only for serious students of American Religious History.
April 29, 2023
I didn't realize that this was a sequel when I started listening to the audiobook. Unfortunately Audible does not have the 1st part for me. It would seem that Noll will write a final installment on the 20th century to the present. The book does focus on Biblical usage over the 19th century but also includes contextual patterns of Christianity. The book is well written while also providing significant depth.
March 12, 2024
Really amazing if you're into the topic, but you'll have to be really into the topic to read it because it is almost unbelievably long. It's rewarding, Noll digs very, very deep into America's history, but it is not light reading.
Want to read
June 5, 2022“Just got through the table of contents and need a break. This is the fruit of a lifetime of labors in the relationship between the Bible and America. Required reading for…everyone.” - Mike Pohlman
November 6, 2023
It was a fascinating read, a little monotonous in areas, but overall I enjoyed it.
December 14, 2024
Way too long, got 64 per cent read, but some interesting factual hx
December 22, 2025
Excellent!
August 12, 2024
Well documented, but the author’s fixation on slavery makes it more of a history of slavery in America. The title is misleading.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews