Description: The Search for a Rational Faith presents a 400-year narrative history of Anglo-American Protestant intellectual defenses of the Christian faith from the seventeenth century to the present. It challenges popular assumptions about secularization by showing that faith and reason have long coexisted in American educational establishments and by demonstrating that the Enlightenment and Darwinian science were much more compatible with American Protestant Christianity than many assume.
Review Quotes: "Williams makes the case that Christian apologetics, far from being some abstruse academic pastime, was-for centuries-an enormous component of America's intellectual and cultural glue, a project that shaped the country's leading educational institutions and left a serious imprint on generations of national leaders inside and outside the bounds of the church, from U.S. presidents to novelists and philosophers. And it was an enterprise focused on a question that ought to interest anyone who cares about religious and intellectual history, even if historians cannot approach the question directly: Is Christianity true?" -- Molly Worthen, author of Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump
"The Search for a Rational Faith is an unusually illuminating history of how American Christian believers have tried to demonstrate the rational and scientifically compatible character of their faith (though also, at times, of whether they should try to do so). The book's historical reach is broad (from the Puritans to the present), its readings charitable for a huge cast of characters, its judgments measured, and its parsing of "evidences" and "apologetics" unfailingly wise. Williams' careful attention to historical contexts also demonstrates how much the specialized debates he examines affected, and were affected by, central developments in the nation's general history." -- Mark Noll, author of America's Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794-1911"Apologetics, or the effort to defend the reasonableness of Christianity, has a long American history, and in this brilliant and sweeping book, Daniel K. Williams tells the story with narrative skill and keen insight. Along the way, he overturns old assumptions, sheds new light on familiar figures, and explains why liberal Protestants abandoned the apologetic project while conservatives embraced it. A compelling and even haunting account." -- Peter J. Thuesen, author of Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine