Mixed Blessings: Christianization and Secularization

Abstract

Mark Twain's tale of those conglomerate Luigi and Angelo Capello, double-headed human creature with four arms, one body, and a single pair of legs, is an appropriate figure for much of American religion since the Enlightenment. These extraordinary twins, Twain tells us, were terribly divided religiously. Luigi's tastes ran to Tom Paine's Age of Reason, pipe tobacco, rum shops, and the Freethinkers' Society; Angelo's to devotional classics, temperance, Methodist meetings, and eventually Baptist full immersion (a miserably wet day for Luigi). Being inseparably joined to his irreligious brother was a grievous trial to Angelo, who, in moments of deep despair, wished that and his brother might become segregated from each other and be separate individuals, like other men. But then he would shudder at these dark imaginings: To sleep by himself, eat by himself, walk by himself-how lonely, how unspeakably lonely. A shivering at the monstrosity of manly isolation, Angelo's quavering was also a recognition that evangelicalism and the Enlightenment, modern religion and natural philosophy, were so bound together that their separation could hardly be conceived. Angelo was stuck with Luigi, and vice versa. Such intense intertwining is especially foregrounded in James Gilbert's Redeeming Culture, but the question of Christianization and secularization is also the one issue that echoes