Religion in America: A Political History

Abstract

Denis Lacorne, a distinguished student of American politics at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (informally known as Sciences Po), has written a fascinating and noteworthy study of American religion. Its primary focus is the historiography of the relationship between religion and American politics and identity as seen through the rich literature of French reflections on that subject. The book's chronology consists of five critical moments or “historiographical regimes” in which two competing narratives of identity formation play out—the origins of one is in the secular Enlightenment; the other's origin is in a romantic Puritan/Protestantism (p. xix). This division, while replicating the tensions explored in Robert A. Ferguson's The American Enlightenment, 1750–1820 (1997) and J. David Greenstone's The Lincoln Persuasion: Remaking American Liberalism (1993), is deepened and complicated when viewed from the perspective of French writings. French intellectuals then and now have often expressed a deep ambivalence about America, seeing it either as a vanguard nation of enlightened democracy or as a godless, hypocritical, money-obsessed nation that is also (paradoxically) an intolerant Anglo-Protestant theocracy. This ambivalence played out in mid-eighteenth-century French portrayals of America as a land of religious utopias—especially William Penn's Quaker Pennsylvania. First pictured by Voltaire, the Marquis de Jaucourt, and Abbé Raynal as reincarnations of ancient republican virtue, by the end of the eighteenth century, these Quaker/Protestant virtues were transformed by French writers into hypocritical covers for expansionism and exploitation; these authors portrayed America itself as dominated by a Puritanism that recalled the fanaticism of barbarians.