Christopher Grasso, Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War

Abstract

American Religion 2, no. 1 (Fall 2020), pp. 189–191 Copyright © 2020, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.1.19 Book Review Christopher Grasso, Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018) Nathan G. Alexander Fort Erie, Canada In recent years, there has been much new scholarship on the history of atheists and unbelievers. Christopher Grasso’s Skepticism and American Faith is part of this trend, but, as he says, “seasoning the narrative of American religious history with the stories of a few vocal freethinkers is not enough” to understand fully the place of skepticism within early America (7). Instead, Grasso tells a holistic story about the ways in which religion and skepticism were intimately linked during this period. For Grasso, doubt and skepticism are not just an interesting but ultimately unimportant tangent to the main story of religion in the period; they are, rather, fundamental. Moving chronologically, Grasso uses individual case studies to develop his argument. These include freethinkers like Elihu Palmer, Abner Kneeland, and Ernestine Rose who openly avowed their skepticism and their hostility to Christianity. But to me the key figures in Grasso’s argument are those skeptics who ultimately ended up embracing some form of Christianity. Following periods of skepticism, these figures became preachers, authored books refuting skeptics, or founded new religious movements. Even someone like Robert Dale Owen, who was an outspoken skeptic for much of his life, became a Spiritualist toward the end. Grasso shows that the individuals’ periods of doubt, even if they American Religion 2:1 190 later returned to Christianity, were formative to their future religious views and shaped the way they continued to relate to the “infidels” of their times. What is striking is how fluid religious identities were in this period. An extreme case is Orestes Brownson, who moved from Calvinism as a child, to Universalism, to an even more radical skepticism, to Transcendentalism, and finally to Catholicism, with his politics transforming in step with his changing religious identities. While most people did not change religions as often as Brownson, religious identity was not static at this time. Individuals tried out various denominations of Christianity and shades of skepticism over the course of their lives. It is not right, therefore, to talk about a sharp religious vs. secular binary. In fact, as Grasso shows, there was blurriness between and within these categories of “religious” and “secular.” For Grasso, it is the wrong question to focus on the absolute numbers of outspoken skeptics in this time as a way to understand their influence. Skepticism had important effects even if they were not straightforward. As he writes, “Religious skepticism did not secularize America, as the free inquirers of the 1830s had hoped, or produce armies of militant atheists, as some Christians had feared. But to rest with that conclusion is to miss the more complicated effects that skepticism did have – effects best seen in the stories of individual lives and in the complex connections of ideas to social and political practices” (356). One example of this is the early religious skepticism of John Bayley, a journeyman printer from England, which was informed by what he saw as church hypocrisy toward wealth inequality. As he grew older, he converted to Methodism, inspired by the piety observed among slaves in Virginia, and his politics also grew more conservative. Previously an advocate for the working classes, Bayley came to believe their poverty was the result of their own moral failings rather than the capitalist system they inhabited. The link between religion and changing social, political, and economic contexts is thus one of the central tensions explored by the book. Another focus is how religious identity is (or is not) connected with a sense of national identity: a key debate throughout the period was whether a new nation could be united by religion and, if so, what kind. Indeed, Grasso’s portrayal of this debate historicizes the concept of “religion” itself by showing that its definition was constructed and contested in this period. If religion was indeed necessary to act as a social glue, skeptics were a dangerous and despised minority. Sometimes...