Jack-in-the-Box Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History

Abstract

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 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