Between 1776 and 1840, Americans experienced two key cultural shifts—the rise of evangelicalism and the popularization of the natural sciences. A growing number of Americans became more deeply wedded to the Bible at the same time that scientific ideas about the natural world became increasingly available to laypeople and pastors through schools, lending libraries, and periodicals. Early American popular culture celebrated a scientific approach to the “book of nature,” using the natural sciences of the age—astronomy, geology, mineralogy, and natural history—to understand God's created world. This dissertation looks at the effects of these two developments upon lived religion in the early American republic by investigating how Christians in the early republic used and understood the natural sciences.

While historians like James Turner and Mark Noll have explored theologians' responses to science, they have largely ignored the place of science in the lived religion of the early republic. How did average churchgoers of differing denominations view the relationship between the biblical and scientific accounts of the natural world? This dissertation addresses this question by looking at the writings of a broad range of Christians—lay churchgoers, students, and pastors—as well as the ways in which popular print culture represented the relationship between religion and science.