Secularism in Antebellum America: With Reference to Ghosts, Protestant Subcultures, Machines, and Their Metaphors; Featuring Discussions of Mass Media, Moby-Dick, Spirituality, Phrenology, Anthropology, Sing Sing State Penitentiary, and Sex with the New Motive Power

Abstract

In Secularism in Antebellum America, John Lardas Modern argues that a broad swath of mid-nineteenth-century American Protestants, although superficially distinct, shared a deeper commitment to the metaphysic of secularism. For Modern, secularism refers not to the retreat of religion but to “that which conditioned not only particular understandings of the religious but also the environment in which these understandings became matters of common sense” (p. 7). Evangelicals, Unitarians, phrenologists, and spiritualists shared an epistemology that asserted humans' capacity for immediate knowledge about the self and the world. By enacting and promulgating their notions of religion according to this epistemology, Protestants were subject to, and co-builders of, a discourse of secularism. This discourse, by excluding challenges to its rationality and neutrality, reassured Protestants of their own rational volition in the face of new technologies that threatened to overwhelm autonomy. Mediated through religious, cognitive, and technological practices, secularism became an effective agent, structuring the permissible world of belief and thought. In antebellum America, Modern sees not proliferating religious options but rather the “resonance between different statements about religion” (p. 15) based on a common secularism.