The Old Religion in a New World: The History of North American Christianity

by Mark A. Noll

One of our foremost historians of religion here chronicles the arrival of Christianity in the New World, tracing the turning points in the development of the immigrant church that have led to today's distinctly American faith.Taking a unique approach to this fascinating subject, Noll focuses on what was new about organized Christian religion on the American continent by comparison with European Christianity. In doing so, Noll provides a broad outline of the major events in the history of the Christian churches that have filled North America with such remarkable vitality and diversity. He also highlights some of the most important interpretive issues in the transfer of the hereditary religion of Europe to America.

Genres: History, Church History, Religion, Nonfiction, Theology, Christianity, American History

354 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 31, 2001

About the author

Mark 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.

Reviews

[Jeremy Mueller · Rating 4 out of 5]

In terms of readability and coherent historical overview, Noll hits the mark in this book! I learned a good bit about particular social, cultural, and historical issues that have affected the development of Christianity in North America. The more I read history, the more I'm reminded that our present world is neither formed in a vacuum nor can it be reformed with the snap of a finger. Our religious landscape is shaped by hundreds of years of outside influences, and as the church of the 21st century, we must be humble enough to learn from the past and dependent enough to cry out to God for his mercy in wisdom in the days before us.

[Adam Shields · Rating 4 out of 5]

Summary: A readable textbook about North American Christianity.

Mark Noll is an author that I will always respect and read. I had him for two undergrad classes and I audited a class with him when I was in grad school. I have read a number of books by him since then. His book The Civil War as Theological Crisis significantly shaped me and I have read it three times now.

The Old Religion in a New World is a textbook. Interestingly, Noll was commissioned to write a German language textbook on North American Christianity. That became this book, although he says he significantly reorganized and edited it.

What I most appreciate about this book is that Noll is particularly paying attention to the comparative aspects of North American Christianity. It is in the comparisons that interesting aspects stand out. Different geographical areas were settled by people from different areas of Europe, who had different religious traditions. Geographies do matter. The Catholicism of Maryland is not the same as in Canada, and while he does not spend a lot of time on Mexico, his brief sketch of the Christian history of Mexico shows a very different Christian development from the US and Canada.

I am very familiar with Christian history of the US (I had Noll for a Christian History of the US and Canada class). But there was still a ton of new information here.

Noll is an Evangelical Reformed Protestant. And many Evangelicals (and Reformed) present their history abstracted from the larger Christian context. This is not an abstracted presentation. Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Black Church, Pentecostalism, and more are all presented as interacting and learning and sometimes change from one another.

The Old World state church model was the way that Christianity was understood to exist. The gradual change from state church to religious freedom in the US had significant impact in how Christianity developed, and predictably it is not all good. Noll does a good job critiquing weaknesses of a competitive Christianity seeking converts. But not all was negative, the freedom to evolve and change to meet the culture allowed for good changes.

Noll also pay attention well to issues of discrimination, slavery, legal and cultural prejudice and how the church has not lived up to its ideal, either the American ones or the Christian ones. There is an enormous amount of content folded into a relatively short book.

I listened to the audiobook. Trevor Thompson is not a new narrator to me. He is not my favorite narrator, but he is clear and the text was well produced. I know that Noll is unlikely to want to read it own textbook, but I do know him well enough that I miss hearing his voice when I am hearing his words here.

[Pig Rieke · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this work, Mark Noll details the conveyance of Christianity from Europe to North America. Beginning from Columbus to the present century, Noll details the expansion and history of Christendom in primarily America with briefer sections devoted to Mexico and Canada. With such a wide and varied history, the author has rightly been commended for capturing so many different veins (history, theology, culture, etc.) into one work. For those looking to gain a wide angle lens on church history in America, I found this work to be an excellent resource.

[Jeff Elliott · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't know what to expect from this book but I really, really enjoyed it. I found it to be thorough yet not boring; fair and objective and short enough that it didn't take forever to get through. I bet if you read it you will see many of your own historical denominations characteristics too!

A few quotes:
p. 12-the most obvious reason why the history of Christianity in Canada and the United States differs from the history of Christianity in Europe is that North America is so much bigger than Europe. The huge expanse of North America gave churches the kind of breathing room that simply had not existed before. This breathing room allowed Christian groups that had felt confined in Europe a chance to develop their own religious visions out of their own internal resources. It allowed European religious antagonists to drift apart. It also gave creative souls every possible opportunity to propose new versions of Christianity.

p. 14-Of special importance for American Christian history is the fact that from the beginning, settlement by Africans took place alongside settlement by Europeans.

p. 26- Christian history in the United States, and to a somewhat lesser degree in Canada, differs from its counterparts in Europe because geography matters, because race and ethnicity have shaped religion from the beginning of European settlement, because North America enjoys a singular degree of religious pluralism, and because European patterns of religious conservatism did not survive passage over the Atlantic. If, however, the history of Christianity in North America is distinctive for these reasons, Christian developments in North America still retain organic connections to historic European patterns as well as to the more recent flourishing of Christianity around the globe.

p. 41- the American Puritan effort to construct a theologically rooted, comprehensively Christian society remains one of the most intriguing intellectual as well as practical efforts in the early modern history of Christianity.

p. 48-Although Methodism spread quite slowly in America until after the American War for Independence (1775–1783), the arrival of those first itinerant (or traveling) preachers was extremely significant. After the American Revolution, Methodism became by far the fastest-growing form of Protestantism in America, and Methodist standards of piety, worship, and service exerted a huge impact on American religious life.

p. 52-His tour of New England that fall was one of the most dramatic events in American religious history. For more than a month, Whitefield preached almost every day to crowds of up to eight thousand spellbound listeners at a time when the whole population of Boston, the region’s largest city, was not much larger than that.

p. 54-Religious leaders shaped by the colonial revivals joined founding fathers like Jefferson and Madison in working toward the First Amendment to the United States Constitution (1789), which prohibited the national government from establishing any one particular religion even as it guaranteed to all citizens protection for the free exercise of religion.

p. 60-In December 1784, Asbury and his associates met in Baltimore to establish a formal organization, and for the next century the Methodists were the driving religious force in America.

p. 61-The Methodists maintained about 30 churches (or preaching stations) in 1780; that number rose to 2,700 by 1820, and to an incredible 19,883 by the start of the Civil War in 1861. By 1860 there were almost as many Methodist churches as United States post offices.

pgs. 61-62-The intense focus of the laity in meeting together to read the Scriptures, confess their faults to each other, and encourage one another in godly living gradually gave way to a religion organized around public services in a church building under the oversight of a formally trained minister.

p. 62-the scholarly president of Yale College in Connecticut, Timothy Dwight, encouraged his students to experience evangelical conversions and then helped some of them find positions as pastors of already existing churches. Dwight’s emphasis was on an orderly, disciplined response to the gospel..

p. 63-The essence of revivalism was direct appeal by a dedicated (often passionate) preacher to individuals who gathered expressly for the purpose of hearing the revivalist’s message.

The purpose of the revival meeting, though approached in many ways, was always the same: to convert lost sinners to faith in Christ and, through the reformed behavior of the converted, to improve society.

p. 64-The growth of the Baptists was only slightly less sensational than the growth of the Methodists. Where there were only about 460 Baptist churches in the country at the end of the American Revolution in 1780, that number had risen to well over 12,000 by 1860.

p. 65-Within a century of its founding, the Southern Baptist Convention had become the largest Protestant denomination in America.

p. 68-The rapid expansion of the United States created the need for such flexible agencies as voluntary societies. Between 1790 and 1830, the population of the United States mushroomed from slightly under four million to almost thirteen million. By 1840 there were more people in the United States than in England, and within twenty more years the American population was almost equal to the national populations of France and of Germany (defined as the constituent parts of the 1870 German empire). Yet rapid as that population growth was, the physical dimensions of the country posed even greater difficulties for coherence, communication, and community. After the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803 doubled the size of the country, the United States possessed a landmass four times the size of modern-day France, Germany, and the United Kingdom combined.

p. 74-The separation of church and state has remained a singular feature of American history, even if the principle has always been more ambiguous in practice than in theory.

The Colonial Period

Despite a persistent American mythology that features “religious liberty” as a main stimulant for British migration to North America, the first colonies actually instituted a tighter governmental control of religion than existed in the Old World.

Before the mid-eighteenth century, church and state were bound together more closely in New England (with the exception of Rhode Island) and the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland (along with South Carolina) than they were in England at the same time

p. 77-In his provisions for religion, William Penn was literally more than a century ahead of his time. By requiring citizens to be theists and by promoting religious observances common to Christian denominations, while at the same time guaranteeing a wide religious toleration within those bounds, he pointed the way to the church-state arrangements that prevailed in most of the states during the first decades after national independence. In the context of the eighteenth century, it was a testimony to the liberality of Penn’s vision that Pennsylvania was the only one of the thirteen colonies where Roman Catholics were allowed the freedom for public worship.

p. 80-The nation’s founders retained the conviction that religion in general was a necessity for public well-being, but they had reached the point of rejecting the kind of establishments favoring one particular church that were still the norm in Europe.

pgs. 82-83-At the start of the national period, “no establishment” meant not having the church-state situation that Southern Anglicans and New England Congregationalists had once enjoyed. “Religious liberty” meant several things: for almost all Protestants it meant the negative freedom of worshipping as one pleased, but for many of the states it also meant a positive freedom to restrict the rights of non-Protestants or non-Christians.

Almost no one in the early United States took this separation of church and state to mean the absence of religious influence on public life.

p. 85-accepting the separation of church and state made many American church leaders into innovators in communication. If it was necessary to promote a religious message oneself in order to have a church of any kind, then it was imperative to be always inventing and improving new ways of promoting the message.

pgs. 97-98-Finney was a wholehearted advocate of “new measures,” many of them taken over from the Methodists. He encouraged women to speak publicly at his meetings, he urged people who were sorry for their sins and who wanted to be converted to gather at an “anxious bench” and pray for divine grace, and he often held “protracted meetings” that lasted for weeks or even months at a time. These innovations were bitterly opposed by leaders of the older churches. Some of Finney’s opponents also worried about the great stress he placed on the ability of individuals to turn to God as an exercise of their own willpower without divine assistance.

p. 98-In the 1840s and 1850s Finney became increasingly concerned that the call to conversion was being overwhelmed by efforts to reform society. His own preaching increasingly stressed “Christian perfection”—a transformation of inner life—rather than the transformation of American society

p. 100-To empower ordinary people meant that some of the people so empowered might act in ways not conforming to inherited standards of faith and practice

p. 101-The history of the Seventh-day Adventists is also of note because, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, it has gradually moved closer to the practices and beliefs of more traditional evangelical Protestant churches.

p. 121- A fairly thorough census of religious bodies by the United States government in 1906 showed that about 17 percent of the nation’s approximately 212,000 local churches were African American. (In 1906 African Americans made up not quite 11% of the nation’s population of 83 million.) More than a third of the nation’s 55,000 Baptist churches were African American, as were about a fourth of the 65,000 Methodist churches.

At the time of the nation’s founding in 1776, there were only 25,000 Catholics (one percent of the population) served by only 23 priests. The religious census of 1906 found that 130 years later the number of communicant Catholics stood at over 12 million (14% of the population) served by over 15,000 clergy in nearly 12,000 church buildings.

p. 122-The movement of peoples that brought 40 million immigrants to the United States between 1800 and 1920 dramatically affected the churches as well as every other aspect of American society. About one-fourth of these immigrants were Roman Catholics.

p. 123-Know Nothings felt that immigrants, especially Roman Catholics, were damaging America’s Anglo-Saxon stock and subverting American liberties by maintaining loyalties to a despotic foreign power—that is, the pope.

Such anti-Catholicism did not characterize all Protestants in all places. But it did indicate that many Protestants thought that they, and no one else, owned America.

p. 125-The story of the Catholic church in America is a story of rapid numerical growth fueled by immigration, but it is also a story of cultural indigenization. As bishops and other church leaders struggled to preserve the faith by ministering to the special needs of immigrants, some also took in hand the business of accommodating with America.

pgs. 128-129-Here it is possible to conclude that the nineteenth-century success of the Catholic church in the United States might be regarded as a surprise. The church largely overcame difficulties of sustaining many immigrant communities. Antagonism from America’s Protestant majority never became crippling. American political liberalism strained Catholic traditionalism but did not overcome it. By the early twentieth century, a church that many Americans had once despised and feared had become the largest denomination in the country and had begun to win at least a measure of respect. So strikingly successful were Catholic efforts in the New World that some modern students see the American climate as better for the church than the traditions of Europe.

pgs. 130-131- Moody tried to talk in a plainspoken style to audiences about God and the need for a Savior. He dressed like a conventional businessman and spoke with reassuring calm. Moody summarized his basic Christian message as the “three R’s”: Ruin by Sin, Redemption by Christ, and Regeneration by the Holy Ghost. He did not expound learned theology, nor did he promote sophisticated formulas for Christian action in society. Instead, he emphasized powerful themes of Christian sentiment.

pgs. 131-132-One of the most successful of the newer bodies was the Salvation Army. The Army had been founded in London in the 1860s by William and Catherine Booth in order to provide Christian witness and social service to the urban poor neglected by other churches. Its brass bands, its willingness to use popular entertainment to attract a crowd, and its combination of spiritual and social activities made a deep impression in Britain. William’s daughter Evangeline (1865–1950) eventually came to head up the work of the Army in the United States, where she promoted the same range of activities that her parents had advanced in England—provision of food, shelter, and medical assistance; vocational training, elementary schooling, and internships in manufacturing and farming; and visits to prisons, legal aid for the indigent, and inexpensive coal in the winter. By 1904 the Army had over nine hundred stations, or corps, in the United States. It was (and remains) the most comprehensive Protestant urban outreach ever attempted.

p. 133-The Social Gospel is often associated with more liberal trends in theology.

p. 134-The events of World War I heightened fears of social disorder in America and paved the way for a prohibition amendment to the Constitution. Growing fears about the effects of drink on the unsavory elements in American society together with a belief that the evils of drink had inspired the crimes of the Kaiser’s Germany motivated the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1919.

p. 135-The prohibition movement, however, could be considered the last gasp of Protestant hegemony. The rapid strengthening of African American churches, Roman Catholicism, Judaism, and still other religious forces new to the United States also made it more and more anachronistic to speak of an America dominated by the descendants of the Puritans. Unanticipated effects of the Civil War, failure with respect to the newly emancipated slave population, large-scale industrial development, and a series of changes in the universities—all these undermined Protestant cultural dominance.

p. 137-In 1905 Tikhon Bellavin (1865–1925), the Russian Orthodox bishop in North America, transferred his see from San Francisco to New York in order to minister more effectively to newer centers of Orthodox settlement.

p. 142-The picture of a unified, dominant American Protestantism has never actually applied in the realities of American history. Before the start of the twentieth century, however, there was at least a measure of truth to the image; after the turn of the century, it became increasingly clear that Protestantism was more a very rough general category for non-Catholic Christians than a cohesive religious force. At the start of the century, two opposing factions—modernists and fundamentalists—began to diverge as they provided dramatically different responses to the era’s intellectual and social pressures.

p. 147-Although the reality of what actually went on in Dayton, Tennessee, at the trial of John Scopes was quite different from this picture, by the mid-1930s it had come to stand for the intellectual suicide of the fundamentalist movement.
Fundamentalism was never as dead as it appeared in the aftermath of the Scopes trial. But by the time fundamentalists re-emerged into the public eye in the 1970s and 1980s, the term had narrowed in meaning. In recent decades it has stood not so much for a general defense of traditional principles of Protestantism, but for a particular combination of biblical interpretations based on premillennial dispensationalism with attitudes and practices of nineteenth-century populist revivalism.

p. 174-all observers see Hispanics becoming a larger, perhaps even a majority, presence in the American church over the next half-century.

pgs. 176-177-The colleges and seminaries of these older, mostly Northern bodies were the centers of a generally liberal theology. That theology stressed human capacities more than traditional views of God’s loving power. It tended to accent what humans could do for themselves in this life instead of how religion prepared people for heaven. Sometimes it waffled in providing moral guidelines for church members. To the extent that such beliefs prevailed in the older denominations, or were even thought to prevail, the churches lost credibility with some of their constituents and failed to recruit new members. By contrast, denominations that stressed traditional beliefs about the supernatural power of God and the reliability of the Bible, or that featured the newer Pentecostal emphases on the immediate action of the Holy Spirit, continued to expand.
Specific numbers provide some help in charting these changes. The steady growth of the Catholic church has made it overwhelmingly the most important Christian denomination in the country. Where the national population grew 102% between 1940 and 1997, the number of Catholic adherents grew 188%. With over 62 million adherents in 1998, the Catholic church in the United States is larger than the total population of either the United Kingdom or France. Even if a large proportion of that Catholic population is nominal, the remainder constitutes a huge, vital force. At least some polling in the 1990s suggests that over half of American Catholics practice their faith with some consistency.

pgs. 177-178-The Protestant bodies whose rates of growth in recent decades have exceeded general population increases—sometimes far exceeded—are nearly all characterized by such labels as Bible-believing, born again, conservative, evangelical, fundamentalist, holiness, Pentecostal, or restorationist. They include the Assemblies of God, the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the Church of God in Christ, the Seventh-day Adventists, the Church of the Nazarene, the Salvation Army, the Baptist Bible Fellowship International, the Churches of Christ, and several more.

p. 178-The largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, underwent a bruising internal struggle during the 1970s and 1980s between a conservative faction seeking to reaffirm more staunchly supernaturalistic theology and more traditional social programs against a moderate faction that resembled the inclusive mainline Protestants of a previous generation. It is indicative of more general trends among Protestants that the conservatives won that internal struggle, and that the Southern Baptist Convention, from 1960 to 1997, grew by nearly 6 million members and at a pace nearly 50 percent higher than the rate of national population growth.

pgs 178-179- In 1996, the Gallup Poll reported that 58 percent of American adults identified themselves as Protestants (or about 110 million out of the country’s approximately 190 million people over the age of 20). Of the Protestants, about one-sixth are African Americans. As noted, the number of Asian American and Hispanic Protestants is each into the millions.

That's all there is room for in this review. You'll have to read the rest yourself

[Shari · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is severely hamstrung by the American- and Christian-centric views of the author. The title is the first indication of what I mean. If you google the phrase "old religion," you will find that it refers to Paganism. But Noll either doesn't know or doesn't care and so has very misleadingly titled his book. Nor is the book really about "North American" Christianity. Canadian and Mexican Christianities are given only a cursory glance.

This kind of bias mars the rest of the book as well. The attempted genocide of Native Americans in glossed over, the witch trials in Salem are not mentioned at all (that's right, a book on the history of Christianity in the United States doesn't mention the 19 people hanged in Massachusetts AT ALL), and the role of Christianity in endorsing the African slave trade is minimized.

Noll ends his history with an overly optimistic assessment of the current state of Christianity, ignoring statistics that show Christianity's popularity is on a slow but significant decline.

All that having been said, the book can be useful to those looking for a broad overview of Christianity in the United States, as long as it is supplemented with other, less biased material as well.

[Calvary Church · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mark Noll is at it again with an effortless survey of Christianity in North America. Noll reminds us that Christianity in North America is an “import religion,” with very few distinctly American denominations. The religion of America is truly an “old religion in a new world.” However, over time, the old religion takes on distinctly American features due in large measure to issues such as space (North America is a big place with room for religious groups to spread out), pluralism (religious freedom has promoted religious diversity), ethnicity (immigration has greatly influenced religion in America) and the absence of confessional conservatism (making it more conducive to democratization). These and other features give religion in American a distinctly new flavoring. Noll also gives a nice overview of Christianity in Mexico and Canada, and uses as nice “case studies” the challenge of immigrant Lutheranism and Roman Catholicism to adapt to its new world environment. One of the nicest contributions to this work is a list of 500 books devoted to the study of Christianity in North America subdivided according to subjects and periods. (Reviewed by F. Lionel Young, III)

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book. The author went beyond recounting the witch trials and Great Awakenings and blah, blah, blah to dig into the context of Christianity in the US. I recognize that few others are as fascinated by this as I am, but I just soaked it up.

The author is a professor at the evangelical Wheaton College, and his perspective (bias?) definitely was evident. Plus he just skimmed right over pesky topics like missionary work among the Native Americans and only gave a nod to black churches. But he really explored the intersection of factors like geography, immigration, democratic competition, rejection of traditionalism...

OK, I'll stop now.

[Ryan Shelton]

Great overview. I would recommend this to anyone who wants a quick overview of the development of Christianity in America, with some comments on how the American trends are contrasted with Canada and Mexico.

[Ronnie Murrill · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this for a class at Southern Seminary I took for post graduate study on the history of the Church in America. It was a great book and a interesting study.

[Josiah Richardson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Noll's work, while full of valuable information, was a pretty rough read. This read like a textbook and was very dry.

[James Hogan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a most educational read. I heard about this from a friend (thanks Dream and David!) and it sounded intriguing enough, I couldn't help but pick it up. I love reading Christian history or church history, and this book - promised to be a kind of history of Christianity in North America - definitely scratched that itch. The author stated in his introduction that he wrote this book for a European audience that often wonders at the differences in Christianity in America. It is quite different, is it not? Well then, what made it that way? I won't entirely give away the plot of the book, but this author's analysis of North American Christianity was most interesting to read. I also liked the author's takedowns of some common misconceptions of American Christianity, especially the discussion on what the separation of church and state in the United States actually means and how it has played out. Over most of the past few hundred years, the wall separating church and state has been much less solid than some may believe. While the Constitution demands that the government neither establish religion nor prohibit the exercise of it, the government(federal/state/local) has been far more involved in the religious life of the United States than some would think. The rigid wall of separation of church and state is a concept that has really only come into focus relatively recently.

Anyways I digress. I appreciate the author's relatively unbiased approach to the history of Christianity, as well as his attempt to also look at the growth and life of Christianity in both Canada and Mexico. So while this book does spend the majority of its time on events that take place in the United States proper, there are multiple large sections dedicated to both Canada and Mexico. The author also attempts to be relatively even-handed in his discussions of different Christian denominations. I respect his ability as a historian and writer to be able to write about this topic in a fair and honest way. He also did not shy away from the failures and weaknesses of the church in North America, most particularly (but not solely) regarding the slavery issue in the United States.

For my own part, I much enjoyed reading this book because I too am in a particular sub-group of Christianity here in the United States, so of course my Christian experience has been colored thus. So whenever the author spoke about the origin of the fundamentalists or the more recent evangelicals, my ears perked up and I recognized much more of the history and the names spoken of. I enjoyed the author's discussion on Jonathan Edwards (someone I have greatly admired reading in the past, both of his life and his works) and also was fascinated to see what the author thought were both the flaws and the strengths of the evangelical movement. But what I really enjoyed reading about were all the groups that I am not or have not been part of. What of the Lutherans and the Catholics? What of the Pentecostals and the Orthodox? I learned quite a bit about the growth of these various churches in the United States that make me more aware of these churches' distinctives even today. And to the author's main purpose of writing this book? How does the unique North American environment contribute to both the growth and the characteristics of the church in America? I keep attempting to write an explanation in this review, but I hesitate as I don't feel I will be able to adequately communicate this as the author did. Just know that the author does satisfactorily answer this question! So you'll have to read this book to find out. I'll finish off by quoting one of the quotes off the back of the book that I found amusing. "This is the most wide-ranging portrayal of the history of Christianity in North America ever published as a medium-sized book." Sometimes it's nice to read a medium-sized book. You know? And I am encouraged by reading this just to see that God does continue to build His church, no matter the imperfections and frailties of His people. May we all further contribute to the works of God!

[Arthur O'dell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is excellent for what it does: describing the history of Christianity in America in relation to its roots in Europe and its continuing interaction with Europe. That is what the book is.

Here is what the book is not:

1. It is not an exhaustive survey of the history of Christianity in America. Nor does it claim to be. The author has a different book if you are interested in that.

2. It is not a history of American religion. It is focused solely on Christianity. There are other books that discuss the diverse religions in America.

3. It is not an introductory textbook. The author assumes the reader knows enough about American history and Christianity to follow the discussion. This also means it isn't an "easy" read if you don't have the proper background. That said, it isn't a difficult read, either. Anyone who is interested in the subject will benefit by reading this book.

4. The main focus is on the United States. Canada and Mexico receive brief treatments in rwo or three of the chapters, but the meat of the book centers on the United States. If your prinary interest is in the other countries, another book may be a better choice. That said, the comparisions between the three countries are fascinating.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

From colonization to the modern 21st century Prof. Noll takes you on a journey of the Christian faith in North America. The text serves as a wonderful reference textbook. The United States is the focal point of the historical account with minor detours to French Catholic Canadians and Spanish Mexican. The earlier chapters have a historical progression, while the latter chapters become more topical in nature. I especially enjoyed the history of state and church interaction in the United States and brief comparisons to Canada. I was very impressed by Prof. Noll's balanced and fair description of different groups in conflict (e.g., modernist v.s. fundamentalist). The cross comparisons in time of different religious groups in conflict provided some of the most thought provoking commentary.

[Cody · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the minus column, the way the content was covered seemed a bit scattershot, going back and forth from a linear approach to a thematic one. Certain topics felt like they should have received more coverage than they did, such as televangelism and connections between religion and partisan politics.

On the plus side, Noll covered his central idea--old religion in the New World--quite well, covering both continuity and discontinuity to establish what made Christianity in North America distinct from European Christianity. He also discusses events and figures that were less familiar but worthy of our time.

Not the best book I've read related to church history, not even the best I've read from Noll, but still a worthwhile read to be sure.

[Brad Linden]

Dry history doesn’t seem well suited for a “starred” rating. But I appreciated this analysis of how Christianity came to America, and how America’s ethos and geography shaped the “style” of our country’s practice of Christianity. Anytime I read church history, I appreciate how it reminds me that our understanding of scripture, doctrine, practice, or church is inextricably influenced by our cultural moment; things that have an “obvious” interpretation often had a different “obvious” interpretation in the context of several hundred years ago.

The author is bafflingly well researched, there’s 25 pages of end notes. Definitely not a page turner, but I think I learned a lot.

[Peter Kiss · Rating 2 out of 5]

Noll's writing is very dry and uninspiring. While I recognize and appreciate to an extent that he tries to write neutrally, he shows his hand more often than not, and it is usually in favor of liberal leaning theology. His understanding of the seperation of church and state was nonexistent and really didn't seem to have any thought on the notion of sphere soverignty, his presentation of pluralism as a positive was unfortunate, he talks about Roman Catholic events indifferently, and the Bonhoeffer reverence at the end was incredibly unfitting for the book. The book is fine, but the more I have to read from Noll, the less I want to read from him.

[Mmetevelis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very easy to read introduction to the history of Christianity in the United States. The major movements and figures are presented with enough detail to be understood. The book is very helpful with it's timelines and bibliographies. Excellent place to start if you want to dig further at this topic. Pastors will find this a very helpful volume in exploring the realities of faith in the American context. Noll's treatment of Lutheran church issues is helpful. The only drawback is that as this book is now beginning to age some of the data it relies on (pre 2001) is getting dated.

[Hank Pharis · Rating 4 out of 5]

(NOTE: I'm stingy with stars. For me 2 stars means a good book or a B. 3 stars means a very good book or a B+. 4 stars means an outstanding book or an A {only about 5% of the books I read merit 4 stars}. 5 stars means an all time favorite or an A+ {Only one of 400 or 500 books rates this!).

The great news is that I can listen to a book a day at work. The bad news is that I can’t keep up with decent reviews. So I’m going to give up for now and just rate them. I hope to come back to some of the most significant things I listen to and read them and then post a review.

[Mark Seeley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this history a few years ago when the book was published and thought it gave a level account of the religious history of the United States. I appreciated Noll's insights on how the Civil War affected Christian faith with the upward trajectory of Darwinism. This is one I will re-read again down the road.

[Jacob Stevens · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great and concise work about what happened to the Christian groups that came over and settled the new world. It was very helpful to see the factors that made the American Church become the American Church.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is a great read for those that are interested in church history and/or the development of Christianity on the North American continent. Although it does cover the United States in more detail than Mexico and Canada, it does discuss Christianity in those countries as well.

[Blake Laberee · Rating 4 out of 5]

An approachable, sweeping overview of the growth and development of Christianity in North America. I particularly enjoyed Noll pointing out the differences between major "families" of Christianity in the Old and New world (ex:American Lutheranism vs German Lutheranism).

[J. Alfred · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good strong, crisply written history. It is informative and thought-provoking, and like all good academic writing, is strewn with jewels of footnotes all across your path, so if you are at all interested in the subject, it will swell your Amazon list alarmingly.

[Preston Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent overview of Christianity in America and the factors shaping American religious life.

[Stacia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting book! Great Christian history book. Somewhat easy to listen to. I'll have to listen to this one again to get everything out of it!

[Gabrielle]

Enjoyed the concept of this book, and learned a lot about Christianity in America. Did find the structure/readability to be not the easiest to follow.

read for uni

[Joshua Reinders · Rating 5 out of 5]

A historical prelude that is helpful for appreciating the purposefully focused book: The Search for Christian America. Mark Noll's narrative style can be somewhat dry at times, but the knowledge gained is so rich and deep that it's well worth pressing on.

[Anni · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was a required read for Religion in America at school. It's a rough read. Lots of names and dates and too much to rap your head around. Definitely not an enjoyable read by any means.

[Jacob Lines · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this book, Mark Noll addresses the questions of how American Christianity differs from its European roots and why. It makes for a good read. Besides the obvious differences of Europe having state churches for centuries, Noll looks to other major differences, including geography, diversity, race and ethnicity, and political thought. He does a great job of condensing a lot of history and theology into less than 300 pages. While the book is short for the broad scope it embraces, it doesn’t feel too short. Noll identifies major trends and causes and does a good job of explaining how and why different religious groups adapted differently to similar pressures. The subtitle says it is a history of North American Christianity, but the treatment of Canada and Mexico is limited. Most of what he says about them is confined to one chapter in which he compares the two countries’ religious histories to America’s. Overall, I enjoyed the book and would recommend it to people interested in the history of religion.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Christianity in America is so intermingled with democratic, voluntaristic, and innovative aspects of American society that modern European models of a traditional church opposed by elite secular intellectuals in league with the sovereign state simply do not apply. ... A history of Christianity in America provides many details to illustrate how this religious situation has pointed sometimes to Christian integrity, sometimes to the ironic loss of Christian integrity. Not historical scholarship but an ability to hear the gospel and to act upon it will determine which of these paths mark the way to the future."

Beyond its clever title, Mark Noll's "The Old Religion in a New World" is a scholarly blend of history and sociology presented in an engaging and accessible narrative. While admittedly limited in scope, the book traces some of the major influences on and developments in American Christianity. A very interesting read.