The Search for a Rational Faith: Reason and Belief in the History of American Christianity

The Enlightenment and Darwinism posed threats to traditional Christianity.So why have so many highly educated Americans remained committed believers?The Search for a Rational Faith challenges popular theories of secularization with a sweeping 400-year history of Anglo-American Protestant defenses of the Christian faith.Through a detailed study of the arguments of those who found Christian faith compatible with Enlightenment reason, Daniel K.Williams explains why Christian faith has continued to remain a viable intellectual option in the United States even for educated people who accept modern science.From the seventeenth-century New England Puritans who founded Harvard College to the twentieth-century university professors who believed that Christian theism was the only viable grounding for morality in the atomic age, faith and reason have been an integral part of the Anglo-American experience.This book chronicles that story. It is a story that intersects with the spiritual lives of we