Doing It Again

Jon Butler

August 2025

I published Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People in 1990, thirty-five years ago. It wasn't my first book. But it was my first big book, meaning it wasn't a monograph like my first books. Rather, it was a cheeky attempt to reimagine religion among European colonists, then Americans, from early European colonization in British North America to the Civil War. I call it cheeky because I was trying to disagree with what I saw as the dominant ways to describe religion in early America.

Critical changes have occurred in academia and the study of religion since then, if at different rates. Two seemingly contradictory changes have transformed higher education broadly: the vast increase in endowment riches, especially in private research institutions, and the bankrupting rise in student tuition, room, and board. The changes now demanded by the Trump administration may dwarf even those significant alterations, though they're incomplete and beyond comment here.

Digitization and the internet have transformed scholarly research and publication in every field. When I began Awash in the 1980s, JSTOR and databases were in their infancy, laptops and software crude, and most historians still took hand-written notes on lined 3" by 5" cards. Now massive swaths of books, journals, and magazines from all centuries have been digitized, many archival materials are easily downloaded, software is sophisticated, and laptops can store gigantic quantities of notes and materials for multiple books, not just a chapter. 

In religious studies specifically, what I'll just call "theory" has become a dominant scholarly mode, most obviously in scholarship on contemporary religion anywhere in the globe. Recent articles in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion treat subjects such as performativity, methodological numenism, biosoteriology, B-side spirituality, and so forth—the list could be far longer. But the "theory" drift is much less pronounced in historical scholarship. Articles in Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, Religion and American Culture, and the Journal of Ecclesiastical History still take root in primary sources, although many current essays treat subjects seldom examined in, say, the 1950s, notably women, lay religiosity, and non-Christian religious life.

Awash in a Sea of Faith depended on primary sources, some unusual, to rethink the character of American religion up to the Civil War. It criticized American religious history for its Puritan-Evangelical focus, stressed the breadth of lay religiosity including occultism and magic, tagged "The Great Awakening" as an "interpretative fiction," described the Middle Passage as an "African Spiritual Holocaust," and described how powerful emerging denominational institutions helped turn the new republic into a vibrant "spiritual hothouse." It was heavily influenced by scholarship on early modern Europe, including work by Keith Thomas, Emanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and William Christian, Jr., and many others. But it made its case with historical sources not theoretical constructions. It got good reviews, won several book prizes, and has had an unexpectedly long shelf life.

You'd think it would be easy to say how I would write Awash today, either as a retired historian or as a newer PhD. But it's not. Certainly, I would correct Awash's deficiencies, including how little it engaged the work of women in American religion. Abundant scholarship existed on women and religion in early modern Europe and America when I researched Awash and I was remiss in ignoring the subject, an embarrassing failure. No historian starting today would be so obtuse. 

But the substantial changes in both American religious history and religious studies across the last thirty years would make a new Awash markedly different than my 1990 version, well beyond the women's issue. The most remarkable, in my view, are newer American religious histories whose theoretical approaches recast their subjects and sometimes recast how we think of religion altogether. Three illustrate their character and achievements: the psychological reexamination of Black's women's religiosity in the antebellum South in Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh's Souls of Womenfolk, the expansive reassessment of ritual in antebellum America in Dana Logan's Awkward Rituals, and the eye-opening focus on nostalgia's ability to uplift commitment to modern American Judaism in Rachel Gross's Beyond the Synagogue.

This said, tension between historians and religious studies scholars complicates the landscape on which re-writing Awash might be considered. Kathryn Lofton's 2019 Modern American History article, "Why Religion Is Hard for Historians (and How It Can Be Easier)," explains a good part of the problem, namely, historians' certitude about what religion is. Indeed, she argues specifically that I and other historians have not "reflected critically enough on the term that organizes their historiographical critique[s]," notably the centrality we commonly assign to belief in identifying religion.

 I can't speak for others and their books, but she is right about my Awash. It prioritized the anthropologist Melford Spiro's emphasis on belief as the defining point of religion and just stuck with it. I'd like to think that my 2020 God in Gotham on modern Manhattan did better by exploring women's centrality to Manhattan's religious life and offering multiple understandings of how twentieth-century New Yorkers might have conceived religion, from simple church membership humorously expounded long ago by Henry Fielding's Parson Thwackum to William James and James Baldwin. 

But I won't rewrite Awash, not least because others have been doing it vigorously since the book was published. Some resolutely stick to traditional primary sources, such as Douglas Winiarski's Darkness Falls on the Land of Light, his revelatory account of eighteenth-century New England's revivals based on truly extraordinary primary research. But many others take new approaches, not only the books by Wells-Oghoghomeh and Logan, plus Gross's Beyond the Synagogue, whose approach can be applied to earlier centuries, but others, many cited in Lofton's 2019 article, from Rebecca Goetz's The Baptism of Early Virginia and Charles Irons's The Origins of Proslavery Christianity to Katharine Gerbner's Christian Slavery and Robert Orsi's Between Heaven and Earth, among others.

The process has proceeded for decades. Perry Miller's 1939 The New England Mind and his subsequent books exploded early American religious history. But beginning in the 1960s a spate of books on New England towns—"community studies"—opened the towns' rambunctious civil and religious life and showed how narrow Miller's intellectual history could be. But the long fixation on New England abated. Attention shifted to slavery and Native American history, and now to a "vast early America" stretching from a previously ignored Caribbean to the American southwest. 

Assuming colleges, universities, faculties and Americans everywhere get through the Trump administration's onslaught on learning and a reasoned politics, there is every reason to think this renewal will continue as it almost always has. We can let our old work rest and turn to new subjects in new ways, which is how our own old work began decades ago.

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The author thanks Kathryn Lofton for her help with this essay.

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Blog Post Title Three

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

Blog Post Title Four

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.