Includes bibliographical references (p. 569-602) and index

Introduction : theology and history -- Theology in colonial America -- The long life and final collapse of the Puritan canopy -- Republicanism and religion : the American exception -- Christian republicanism -- Theistic common sense -- Colonial theologies in the era of the Revolution -- Innovative (but not "American") theologies in the era of the Revolution -- The evangelical surge ... -- ... and constructing a new nation -- Ideological permutations -- Assumptions and assertions of American theology -- The Americanization of Calvinism : contexts and questions -- The Americanization of Calvinism : the congregational era, 1793-1827 -- The Americanization of Calvinism : explosion, 1827-1860 -- The Americanization of Methodism : the age of Asbury -- The Americanization of Methodism : after Asbury -- The "Bible alone" and a reformed, literal hermeneutic -- The Bible and slavery -- Failed alternatives -- Climax and exhaustion in the Civil War -- Conclusion : contexts and dogma

Religious life in early America is often equated with the fire-and-brimstone Puritanism best embodied by the theology of Cotton Mather. Yet, by the nineteenth century, American theology had shifted dramatically away from the severe European traditions directly descended from the Protestant Reformation, of which Puritanism was in the United States the most influential. In its place arose a singularly American set of beliefs. In America's God, Mark Noll has written a biography of this new American ethos. In the 125 years preceding the outbreak of the Civil War, theology played an extraordinarily important role in American public and private life. Its evolution had a profound impact on America's self-definition. The changes taking place in American theology during this period were marked by heightened spiritual inwardness, a new confidence in individual reason, and an attentiveness to the economic and market realities of Western life. Vividly set in the social and political events of the age, America's God is replete with the figures who made up the early American intellectual landscape, from theologians such as Jonathan Edwards, Nathaniel W. Taylor, William Ellery Channing, and Charles Hodge and religiously inspired writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catherine Stowe to dominant political leaders of the day like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln