Religion on the American Mind

Abstract

Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century Is US literary studies in danger of being left behind-like the earthlings stranded after the Rapture in the best-selling series of novels by evangelical writers Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins? One of the marked disparities between its vicissitudes in the late twentieth century and the drift of mainstream US culture is that religiocentric frames of explanation started to go out of fashion at about the same time evangelical Christianity began to seize control of public culture to a degree unprecedented since colonial times. Never before has there been an epoch in national history quite like the past three decades, during which every successful presidential candidate has felt it necessary at least to pretend that he was a born-again Christian. Yet during the same period, literary studies by and large has moved decisively away from religiocentric explanations of the dynamics of cultural history. The Carter era coincided with the ascendancy of poststructuralism. In American literary studies, the core dynamic of the Puritan legacy was reinterpreted by Sacvan Bercovitch as centering not mainly on the system of covenant theology and its aftermaths as Perry Miller had maintained but as an ideologized ritual of tribal/national consensus, soon after which the whole assumption of the historic centrality of Puritanism specifically, and WASP culture more generally, was scrapped by the now-not-so-New Americanists.1 By the next generation it had become standard critical practice to assess religious issues and allegiances as subsidiary to secular concerns, motives, and modes of social belonging. In the 1950s, the question of Melville's religious orientation-how deeply marked he was by Calvinism, whether or not he was God-defiant to the last, etc.was a burning question.2 By century's end, Moby-Dick's whiteness had come to seem more compelling for its racial than for its