America is a religious nation, but its historians, like most of its intellectuals, tend to be secular. As a result, American religious history has remained until relatively recently an intellectually underdeveloped field. The prevailing liberal and secular biases of most historians produced overviews of church history notable for anachronistic judgments and a general tendency to miss the point of religious experience. The history of American religion was regularly written from a perspective in which the chief ends of faith were liberty of conscience and the transformation of the social order. (These comments apply particularly to what might be termed the textbook consensus on American religion; they are less true of monographic studies or of the myriad—and often filiopietistic—denominational histories. As Herbert Butterfield noted almost fifty years ago in The Whig Interpretation of History, whig biases normally crop up in broad historical overviews rather than in detailed researches.)