Throughout, the richness of detail, nuance, and illustration is superb and often eye-opening...In all, it is
a daring work of synthesis...meticulously researched...This book ranks among the most challenging and far-ranging
historical analyses of religion in America to date."
--Leigh Eric Schmidt, Journal of Church and State
"This is one of those rare books that historians await impatiently for years. It is also one of those rare
and remarkable books that prove worth the wait. It fulfills extravagantly the promise of those pathbreaking and
pugnacious articles that made magic an essential reality of the seventeenth century and the Great Awakening an
interpretive fiction of the eighteenth. It is, by far, the best account we have of early American religious life,
and the most radiantly original."
--Michael Zuckerman, Journal of the Early Republic
"Anyone who wants to know about religion in America up to the Civil War would do well to read Jon Butler's
rich, comprehensive and--it must be said--contentious account."