Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War by Christopher Grasso

Abstract

Reviewed by: Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War by Christopher Grasso Douglas L. Winiarski (bio) Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War christopher grasso Oxford University Press, 2018 649 pp. Historian Christopher Grasso has a problem: the “problem of skepticism and faith” (4). His expansive new book on religion in America from the Revolution to the Civil War takes its place among a welter of contending academic studies that characterize the period as one of either evangelical ascendancy or secular insurgency. But for Grasso, it is the “entanglement” (7) of the two that mattered most—and that would, in time, come to define the sprawling religious culture of the new United States. Of the two eponymous categories, skepticism initially seems to dominate. Grasso begins with the assertion that his study will put “skepticism back into the story of American religious history” (7). Yet this is no mere reclamation project. In Grasso’s assured prose, skepticism and faith become much more than a “contest of opposing ideas” (4). He envisions them anchoring the ends of continuum across which people moved throughout their lives. Grasso is especially attuned to the specific moments in which these terms were invoked and mobilized in particular economic, political, or social contexts—the “alchemy of real life” (195). Drawing on the extensive literature of lived religion—and “lived irreligion, too” (4), as the author quips in his introduction—Skepticism and Faith seeks to move “beyond the confines of traditional intellectual history” and into the “daily practices” (4) of an eclectic cast of characters who engaged with and expressed indifference toward traditional forms of Protestantism. Grasso organizes the book into four loosely chronological parts. “Revolutions, 1775–1815,” examines the “relationship of religion and government” and the “ways that religion could be practiced in a ‘free’ environment” (20). Part 2, “Enlightenments, 1790–1840,” presents a broad array of clergymen and freethinkers who grappled with new intellectual and philosophical trends and vigorously debated what it meant to live in an “enlightened and Christian” nation. Social reformers take center stage in part 3, “Reforms, 1820–1850,” in which Grasso shows how the twin poles of skepticism and faith shaped Americans’ experiences of emergent capitalism and its attendant social ills. The final two chapters, in a part titled [End Page 273] “Sacred Causes, 1830–1865,” trace the diverse strategies through which the skeptical and faithful alike “sanctified” (394) sectional politics during the decades leading up to the American Civil War. Seen from one angle, Skepticism and Faith is an ambitious cultural history written on a vast scale. Grasso tackles large historiographical issues ranging from citizenship and social reform to slavery and western expansion. He draws on a staggering number of newspapers; books, tracts, pamphlets, and essays; autobiographies and novels; letters, journals, and other archival texts. Yet the book remains an intimate portrait of antebellum religious life, carefully organized around prosopographical chapters featuring both notable and obscure individuals. In early chapters recovering the intellectual worlds of deists and other skeptics, Grasso offers tantalizing evidence of freethinking African Americans whose experiences of enslavement led them to reject all forms of religion; and he plumbs the troubled mind of Connecticut lawyer William Beadle, whose dabbling in deist literature led to murder and suicide—and partly inspired Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland. Other chapters track the sinuous religious lives of prominent figures, including novelist and Catholic convert Orestes Brownson, abolitionist Jarena Lee, biblical numerologist William Miller, Methodist itinerant Jeremiah Minter, and social reformers Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen. Grasso also works with a fascinating cast of little-known but not-quite-ordinary men and women, such as Richard Hildreth, a bookish Utilitarian philosopher; Ernestine Rose, whose incendiary assault on the fundamentals of the Christian faith and passionate defense of women’s rights sparked a riot at the 1853 Hartford Bible Convention; and a host of others who read Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason and the Bible, attended philosophical lectures and revival meetings, joined churches and utopian communities, and, above all, preached, discussed, debated, and published their endlessly shifting views on natural philosophy and revealed religion. Grasso’s braided biographies brim with irony, strange twists and...