Earlier this month, Mark Noll provided perhaps the most provocative argument of the 3rd Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture when he claimed that the America of 1740-1820 was a "creation of the Bible," bolstered by the Protestant non-establishment. He went further, arguing that public use of scripture is always political in the United States. When pressed to elucidate further, most notably by John Corrigan's question of how Noll's understanding of the period in question differed from previous arguments made by Jon Butler, Noll stood his ground (Charlie McCrary penned a fantastic summation of the conference on the Junto; for a tweet by tweet timeline, see this Storify).
