This book is fascinating not just to those interested in history, for many of the views discussed in this book are still prevalent today.

Noll talks about what happened in America that happened nowhere else: the combination of historic Christian orthodox belief and republican political freedom. Everywhere else, when people started to desire political democracy they were often also desiring to reject Christianity (i.e. French Revolution). Noll shows that the Founding Fathers were, for the most part, not Christians seeking to build a Christian nation.

I wish more evangelical Christians would read Mark Noll rather than someone like David Barton. While reading this book I got an e-mail forward, written by David Barton, saying how real Christians could not vote for Obama. The idea is that true Christian faith also happens to endorse conservative American political views. Maybe conservatism is the best political philosophy (I have no idea) but it is pretty clear it is not from the Bible. But, like a fish not noting the water it swims in, we do not notice how we have combined Biblical truths with inherited American ones. Unlike Barton, who seems to have an agenda, Noll appears to want to get to the honest truth of history (and thus is why I get e-mail forwards from him and not Noll). He is a Christian, but he does not feel the need to recreate early Americans in his own image.

He writes at length on the influential Christians (Jonathan Edwards) in the colonies. But the work of Jefferson, Madison and most of the Fathers was not Biblically motivated. But discovering the faith commitments of the Founding Fathers is not actually the primary part of the book.

Noll then shows how the uncritical adoption of Scottish Common Sense realism formed how Christians in the 1800s read the Bible. Where early colonial theologians, like Jonathan Edwards, emphasized the traditional Calvinist view that without God's enlightening no one could understand scriptural truth (let alone be saved), later Christians bought into the philosophy that all people have this ability. The assumption was that any person could pick up the Bible and simple read what it literally says and come to the true conclusion. The problem with this was demonstrated in the Civil War as two sides read the Bible and disagreed.

This problem went deeper as those who supported slavery seemed to have the literal Bible on their side. Christians in the North who opposed slavery struggled to meet their foes on exegetical grounds. They knew slavery was wrong, but they had to basically admit the Bible allowed it on a literal reading. This forced some theologians to move in new directions, but in a culture that had completely adopted the common sense literal reading as THE reading, they could not provide powerful enough arguments to best supporters of slavery.

I could not help but think about contemporary debates evangelical Christians have and how they practically replay this. Most recently was the dust-up over Rob Bell's book Love Wins and views of hell. It seemed many of his most vocal opponents pointed to the common sense literal reading to support the traditional view of hell. Just as supporters of slavery would proof-text, finding specific scriptures that support slavery, so supporters of the traditional view did the same with hell. Rob Bell, like the abolitionists, seemed to go a different direction, feeling in his gut that the traditional view is wrong. Bell may not have proof-texts to support his views, the abolitionists did not either.

Now I do not mean to say the two issues are the same. It just seems that we have forgotten the lessons of the Civil War, primarily that if we claim to just read the Bible literally we throw out all kinds of cultural context, not to mention we have little hope when different literal readings clash. No evangelical Christian thinks slavery is a good, God-ordained institution. Perhaps this simply shows that any who claim to read the Bible simply "literally" really are not. Or at least a more nuanced definition of "literal" is needed.

That was not really related to the book. Overall the book was interesting, well-argued and thought-provoking. It reminded me why I love reading history: to learn from our past, hopefully so we can avoid repeating it!