The Sovereignty of the Secular and the Power of Religion

Abstract

expression and the fine arts. And speculation about religion is a crucial component of quotidian meaning and ideation. An individual's moral and belief systems are shaped by many intellectual and emotional strains, and it is unlikely that one sorts these elements into and secular. As I observed of social gospelers in A Consuming Faith. The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture, In order to appreciate these social gospelers as the authors of a new kind of Protestantism, we must also understand them as men and women, children and parents, workers and citizens (12). Their secular pursuits conditioned This content downloaded from 157.55.39.56 on Tue, 18 Oct 2016 04:49:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms American Literary History 337 their religious striving, and, I could have added, their positions as workers, citizens, spouses, parents, and children would make little sense without knowing of their Christian worldview. Looking at religious experience as part of cultural history explores the sacred and the secular in relation to one another at different moments in the American past. Its practitioners assume that it is impossible to comprehend the meaning of a religious phenomenon-whether it be a movement like the Social Gospel, a series of events like the Great Awakening, or the influence of a preacher like Peale-without fixing it somehow in the social and cultural world that gave it life and that it in turn shaped. Scholarship thus grounded may, indeed, show that in the late twentieth century, secularity is sovereign in American public life, but that insight need not come at the expense of recognizing the power of religion in individual and community life. The relationship between sacred and secular, however, is not unidirectional. That is, it is not merely a question of the shaping power of culture and society on religion. Rather, one must also recognize the power of religious ideas, images, symbols, and moral systems to add depth and meaning to other aspects of cultural life. More than one scholar has noted the profound impact of the Great Awakening on Americans' political consciousness on the eve of the American Revolution. Similarly, the interactions between the evangelical demand for self-control and moral free agency in the early nineteenth century made a moral virtue of economic necessity in the nascent market system and expanding workshops of the Northeast (see Johnson 136-41). Likewise, the full importance of progressives' reform activities and utopian hopes eludes the scholar who ignores the religious significance of terms-like those in Edward Alsworth Ross's title Sin and Society: An Analysis of Latter-Day Iniquity (1907)-used in the political crusade for social justice (see Curtis 128-78; Crunden 3-15). Perhaps most importantly, the cultural approach to religion demands a nuanced understanding of the interplay between various dimensions of life. Rather than seeing churches' appropriation of commercial idiom as a sign only of the capitulation of the sacred to the secular, for example, one can also see it as the investment of moral importance in a particular system of exchange and as a new metaphor for religious community. Both social gospelers and Peale in the twentieth century borrowed language and techniques from the economic realm as they urged prospective Christians to sample their religious wares and as they refitted their institutions to be more effective in the world at Looking at religious experience as part of cultural history explores the sacred and the secular in relation to one another at different moments in the American