The two most prevalent ways of understanding the early American experience
concerning religion might be styled as providential Christianity and Enlightenment secularism. But this new book by Christopher Grasso, Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War (OUP), seems to describe a third possibility: doubt. It’s not crystal clear to me from the description below how the author distinguishes agnosticism from Enlightenment/secular skepticism. Guess I’ll have to read the book!
Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, the dialogue of religious skepticism and faith shaped struggles over the place of religion in politics. It produced different visions of knowledge and education in an “enlightened” society. It fueled social reform in an era of economic transformation, territorial expansion, and social change. Ultimately, as Christopher Grasso argues in this definitive work, it molded the making and eventual unmaking of American nationalism.
Religious skepticism has been rendered nearly invisible in American religious history, which often stresses the evangelicalism of the era or the “secularization” said to be happening behind people’s backs, or assumes that skepticism was for intellectuals and ordinary people who stayed away from church were merely indifferent. Certainly the efforts of vocal “infidels” or “freethinkers” were dwarfed by the legions conducting religious revivals, creating missions and moral reform societies, distributing Bibles and Christian tracts, and building churches across the land. Even if few Americans publicly challenged Christian truth claims, many more quietly doubted, and religious skepticism touched–and in some cases transformed–many individual lives. Commentators considered religious doubt to be a persistent problem, because they believed that skeptical challenges to the grounds of faith–the Bible, the church, and personal experience–threatened the foundations of American society.
Skepticism and American Faith examines the ways that Americans–ministers, merchants, and mystics; physicians, schoolteachers, and feminists; self-help writers, slaveholders, shoemakers, and soldiers–wrestled with faith and doubt as they lived their daily lives and tried to make sense of their world.
constitutional rules concerning the freedom of speech. One thing that struck me in talking to them is the comparative receptivity of this group to “hate speech” restrictions. Unlike many other countries, the United States has, thus far, resisted regulating such speech because of its assertedly “hateful” or “harmful” qualities. Here’s an interesting looking new study of the relationship of hate speech and religion, an area that is receiving new scholarly interest in light of increasing calls for government speech restrictions that are deemed “hateful”–
Here is an interesting-looking book arguing that the contemporary US-Israel alliance has less to do with recent phenomena and more to do with the historical identification Americans have had with Biblical Israel. The identification dates to the English Reformation. The Puritans brought with them a strong sense of commonality with the Israel of the Old Testament–consider all those Old-Testament names they gave their children–and that sense of identity has continued in American Protestantism, and therefore American culture more generally, ever since. In this way, contemporary Evangelicals really are the heirs of Cotton Mather.
As Marc wrote last week, religious accommodations are the focal point of most of our law-and-religious controversies nowadays. When it comes to taxes, of course, the government accommodates religious organizations by exempting them (it does this for other charitable organizations as well). No doubt these exemptions, so much a part of American tradition, will come under increasing scrutiny in the years ahead.
Our sister institution, Università LUMSA in Rome, has announced that it will host a
This Friday, January 26, the Journal of Catholic Legal Studies (a publication of St. John’s University School of Law) will host a symposium on the new casebook
For today’s Scholarship Roundup post, I’m going to exercise the host’s privilege and post a new essay of my own, “