Reviews of Books

If the Enlightenment had a capital city anywhere in eighteenth-century America, it was surely Philadelphia. Home to the American Philosophical Society, the Quaker City boasted a remarkable collection of intellectuals engaged in the study of the natural world. Benjamin Franklin is the best-known figure, thanks to his contributions to the study of electricity. But a variety of others--the botanist John Bartram, the physician Benjamin Rush, the minister-educators Samuel Stanhope Smith and Francis Alison, to name a few--embraced the latest science of the age, and they did so in a spirit of piety distinct from Franklin's more secular deism. Where many historians treat Franklin's version of enlightened science as representative of the age, Nina Reid-Maroney argues that the deeply pious members of the "Philadelphia circle" were far more central to Philadelphia's Enlightenment.

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Reid-Maroney's account of America's particularly Christian Enlightenment is explicitly revisionist in intent, seeking to undermine the standard story about the inevitably antagonistic relations (or as she puts it, the "supposed tension" [p. xiii]) between religion and science. Rather than following an older narrative line that saw eighteenth-century religion struggling in vain to defend the truth of revelation against the onslaught of Enlightenment sciences such as natural history, botany, and chemistry, Reid-Maroney's collective intellectual biography flips this narrative on its head. As she proceeds through a handful of case studies of well-known figures like Rush and Bartram as well as more obscure theologian-philosopher-scientists like John Ewing, Ebenezer Kinnersley, and Robert Smith, she demonstrates that these thoroughly Calvinist thinkers confidently embraced Enlightenment science, viewing it as a logical extension of their piety rather than as a threat to it. While teleologically minded historians may continue to search the eighteenth-century archive for intimations of the approaching divide between religion and science, Reid-Maroney argues persuasively that such approaches will inevitably misrepresent the intentions of most participants. To tell the story of America's Christian Enlightenment "on its own terms" we must recognize that it was "not about the effort to 'rationalize' things spiritual; rather it [was] about the effort to sanctify things rational" (pp. xii-xiii). In step with most recent studies of the English-speaking Enlightenment, Reid-Maroney's account implies that the anti- (or a-) religious Continental Enlightenment Peter Gay so richly described bore little resemblance to its cousin across the Atlantic.

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