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Jack-in-the-Box Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History
Jon Butler
| It has seldom been possible, much less wise, to assess American history before the Civil War without taking religion seriously. The Puritans fascinated nineteenth-century historians and novelists alike, although the portraits left by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville easily outlasted those crafted by George Bancroft or even the truculent Brooks Adams. Then in the 1930s Samuel Eliot Morison and Perry Miller transformed the Puritans' crabbed image by taking them seriously as intellectuals. "Puritanism was one of the major expressions of the Western intellect," Miller proclaimed, and his reassessment stimulated an outpouring of American Puritan studies that continued into the 1990s. This mountainous scholarship not only revised our view of the Puritans, but led to a renaissance in American historical writing generally.1 |
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Historians have long found religion
important well beyond New England. For two centuries they have written
extensively about Quakers, evangelicals, revivalists, African and
Native American religions preserved and destroyed, and spiritually
inspired reformers. They have also found religion critical to the
American experience not just in New England, but in the middle colonies
and states, in the increasingly evangelical South, and on the frontier.
Indeed, so much antebellum reform is now traced to Protestant evangelicalism—from
abolitionism to women's rights, education, and, still more, temperance—that
we may undervalue secular sources for those movements. The scholarship
on the pre–Civil War United States read by nearly every American
history Ph.D. candidate since the 1950s has long featured religion
at almost every critical interpretative point, whether in Edmund
S. Morgan's The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop
(1958), Rhys Isaac's The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790
(1982), Eugene D. Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the
Slaves Made (1974), or David Brion Davis's The Problem of
Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1832 (1975).
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Religion has not fared well in the historiography of modern America, however. That is not because major figures who invoked religion did not move America intellectually, morally, or politically after 1870. One need think only of Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health with a Key to the Scriptures (1875), William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), Mordecai Kaplan's Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life (1934), Vine Deloria Jr.'s God Is Red (1973), or The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) to acknowledge texts whose religious messages had powerful cultural repercussions. And historians have written imaginatively about religion in modern America. Consider T. J. Jackson Lears's subtle No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (1981), George Marsden's challenging Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (1980), Richard Wightman Fox's compelling Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (1985), or Paul S. Boyer's endlessly fascinating When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (1992). Those and other histories take religion in America after 1870 very seriously indeed. But such works also constitute much less of the scholarship on their era than religiously engaged books do of the scholarship on the colonial, early national, and antebellum eras. More important, they stand outside the interpretative mainstream, which overwhelmingly finds religion in modern America more anomalous than normal and more innocuous than powerful. |
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