Description
This book tells an strange story of the people of early New England and their spiritual lives. It’s about unusual people–farmers, housewives, artisans, merchants, sailors, aspiring scholars–struggling to make sense in their time and place on the earth. David Hall describes a world of religious consensus and resistance: a number of conflicting beliefs and believers ranging from the committed core to outright dissenters. He reveals for the first time the many-layered complexity of colonial religious life, and the importance within it of traditions derived from those of the Old World. We see a religion of the laity that was once to merge with the tide of democratic nationalism within the nineteenth century, and that remains with us as of late as the essence of Protestant The usa.