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Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. By JON BUTLER. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. xii + 360 pp. $29.50.
This award-winning book seeks to explain the Christianization of America through a process of syncretism. The contradiction is more apparent than real as Butler joins others in trying to wrest American religious history from the morte main of the Puritan paradigm. Faith--or religion--says Butler is "belief in or resort to superhuman powers" or "beings" based on folk beliefs which eventually fused with Christian traditions to create a heterogeneous Christianity by 1865. Defining the process as he does, Butler challenges scholars to think anew about Christianity in American culture.
Butler's analysis of syncretism is partially subverted by his self-conscious revisionism. For example, his argument that Christianity was "renewed" by the coercion of government and dissenters is meant to revise the filiopietism of dissent. But social order imposed with no consent is much different from that created by mutual agreement--as African-American slave Christians knew. Since dissenting institutions were closer to popular beliefs than traditional state churches and therefore more incipiently syncretic it is surprising that Butler should argue that the state church tradition gave...