Great Awakening Research Articles

Smitten: Sex, Gender, and the Contest for Souls in the Second Great Awakening

Smitten: Sex, Gender, and the Contest for Souls in the Second Great Awakening

Love and Emotions in Pietist Hymnography—From the Past to Us: Musical Examples

This study aims to analyze, through religious hymns in the German-speaking area from the early 18th century, the influence that the Pietist theological movement, starting from Philipp Jacob Spener’s Pia Desideria, had on the centralization of the self in the Protestant religious world, through the introduction of personal feelings of love towards God. On the one hand, the origins of Pietism can already be traced back to the late 16th century in areas affected by the radical reforms of the Anabaptists. On the other hand, it is from the late 17th century and throughout the 18th century that this theological and spiritual movement destabilized orthodox Lutheranism in some symbolic cities of Protestant Germany, such as Frankfurt am Main, Halle, and the Duchy of Westphalia, up to Moravia. The extensive publication of hymnals and musical compendia for the use of individuals, lay groups (collegia pietatis), faith communities, and churches denotes a fervor and a desire to preach their way of “practicing” spirituality, which greatly contrasts with both orthodox Lutheranism and the prevailing rationalism in the religious and philosophical sphere in Germany of the mid-18th century. For the first time since the Reformation, Lutheranism saw the use, in the theology of the preached and sung Word, of personal feelings and emotions that connect the individual with God, who is made an object of individual as well as collective worship. This was one of the most significant accusations that came from the University of Wittenberg against Pietism, namely the shift of theological and spiritual focus from the centrality of God to the centrality of the self, which manifests its faith through the most intimate emotions and feelings. Through the analysis of some examples taken from hymnographic and theological production, centered on the individual feelings of the believer, this article focuses on how this influenced the religious revival movements that would pervade England and the United States of America for more than two centuries (from the First Great Awakening in the late 18th century to the Pentecostal movements of the 20th century), with a spotlight on Italian hymnody during the Risorgimento.

Evangelical Time, Separatism, and the “Spiritual Travels of Nathan Cole”

Abstract This essay intercedes in our understanding of the temporal formations that characterized New England’s Great Awakening (1730s-1740s). It takes as its case study the Connecticut farmer Nathan Cole, whose spiritual new birth scholarship has been seen as prototypical of both the instantaneity and the affect of evangelical conversion. This essay contests the predominance of these figurations of the awakenings. Offering literary criticism’s first full engagement with Cole’s archive, rather than keeping to well-known short extracts from his “Spiritual Travels,” it posits the interval as the temporal and literary form that structures Cole’s writing. The essay thus reads Cole’s narrative as something more than a lay account that testifies to evangelical feeling, arguing that his writing instead exhibits continuities with seventeenth-century habits of thought. Particularly, it traces how Cole’s writing carries into the eighteenth century Puritan labors to apprehend doctrines (such as predestination) that were, fundamentally, matters of time. In treating Cole’s text as a document of theological heft and temporal consciousness, as well as spiritual encounter, this essay also asks scholars to consider how turning toward cognitive aspects of devotion provokes our field’s understanding of genre, time, and evangelical experience.

“God’s Most Stubborn Enemy:” Jonathan Edwards on Spiritual Pride and the Hope of a Humble Faith

Spiritual pride is a threat to all who take spiritual formation seriously, but it is often difficult to discern. Reflecting on this vice within the revivals of the First Great Awakening and in his own life, Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) both diagnosed the symptoms of spiritual pride and addressed its potential cures. This article looks specifically at Edwards’s analysis of spiritual pride and his perspectives on the pathways to overcoming its power. In the end, Edwards proposed that Christians could pursue spiritual formation and yet remain humble if they would develop a new perspective of “comparative meanness” and develop new postures of “self-examination” and “glorying.” Edwards’s vision for a humble spiritual formation provides helpful insights both for locating spiritual pride in the Christian life and for severing its varied roots.

“All Say He is a Downright Methodist”: The Ministry and Evangelical Loyalism of the Rev. William Stringer

AbstractWilliam Stringer was at various times a cheesemonger, a Methodist lay preacher, a priest, and an American Loyalist exile. Originally from London, Stringer preached the Gospel for the early Methodist movement, but longed for priestly ordination in the Church of England. Unable to achieve this goal due to his humble background, he was instead ordained in 1764 by the controversial and ecumenically minded Greek Orthodox bishop, Gerasimos Avontilies (also known as Erasmus of Arcadia), who ordained several Methodists under Greek Orthodox rites in London. Having acquired illicit ordination, Stringer moved to Philadelphia where he ministered to a parish that had broken from the Church of England during the Great Awakening. The clergy of Philadelphia responded negatively and wrote to Archbishop Richard Terrick of London, who ordered Stringer to desist from his ministry. However, Stringer did such a remarkable job of bringing his congregation back into the Anglican fold that Terrick agreed to re-ordain him in London under Anglican rites in 1773. With the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775, Stringer supported the British cause and rejected the revolt as inconsistent with Christian obedience. He was forced to leave America and return to England, where he lived out the rest of his life as a curate. Despite his initial transgressions, I argue that Stringer was a force for order, stability, and orthodoxy in a revolutionary world.

Smitten: Sex, Gender, and the Contest for Souls in the Second Great Awakening by Rodney Hessinger (review)

Smitten: Sex, Gender, and the Contest for Souls in the Second Great Awakening by Rodney Hessinger (review)

“늦은 비 성령”에 대한 역사신학적 이해

This study is a historical-theological analysis of the understanding of the “Latter Rain” developed in the 19th and 20th centuries. The understanding of the Latter Rain stems from the Holiness-Pentecostal Movement in the United States in the 19th century. The Latter Rain in
 the Second Great Awakening and the subsequent Holiness Movement was presented as the concept of Holiness or Holy Spirit Baptism. In this process, Holiness-Pentecostalism expected the Latter Rain. Later, in the early 20th century, the Latter Rain Movement took place in the Pentecostal Movement, which was developed along with the gift of the tongue. The Adventists’ understanding of Latter Rain was influenced by the 19th century Holiness-Pentecostalism. White used the term “Latter Rain” without any specific explanation. She emphasized her understanding of the Latter Rain, which differed from Holiness-Pentecostalism, by linking the Latter Rain to the loud cry of the third angel. In the 1880s, the Adventist Church realized that the experience of the third angel's loud cry and the Latter Rain was imminent, and in 1888, the Minneapolis Session of the General Conference understood the announcement as the beginning of a loud cry and the Latter Rain. Consequently, in 1893, the Revival Movement through the Latter Rain took place at Battle Creek Church. The delay in the loud cry reduced the interest in the Latter Rain, and the Adventists waited for the true Latter Rain, defining the tongues and Pentecostal movements that occurred in the 20th century as false Holy Spirit movements. Delaying the achievement of the Latter Rain is becoming an important task in Adventist eschatology.

American evangelical nationalism: history, status quo, and outlook

Evangelical nationalism is a new manifestation of American nationalism in the twenty-first century. Internally, it advocates the integration of national identity and Christian faith, claiming that “America is a Christian nation”. Externally, it pursues the “America First” and isolationist foreign policy. The early religious, political and social activities of evangelicals were mainly embodied in the religious revival called the Great Awakening. The rise of the Moral Majority in the 1970s and 1980s represented an essential exercise in or attempt at evangelical nationalism. The election of Donald Trump as president in 2016 marked the development of conservatism, such as evangelicalism in the U.S., from a religiously conservative force to a full-blown nationalism. Evangelical nationalism rose in the context of response to dramatically changing internal and external environments, the adjustment of traditional conservative strategies, the revival of white racism, the interplay between civic and ethnic nationalism, and the crisis of modernity. On the one hand, the momentum of evangelical nationalism will diminish with the relative alleviation of conflicts both within and outside the U.S., the corresponding adjustment of conservative strategies, and especially the growth of the civic nationalist camp. On the other hand, from the perspective of “identity and ultimate belief”, although the identity problem characterized by the “culture war” will be relatively relieved with the mitigation of internal and external conditions, the United States, as a “Christian nation” underpinned by Christian culture and faith, will see evangelical nationalism resilient. Evangelical nationalism will continue to play an important role in the domestic and foreign affairs of the United States.

Early Black Thought Leaders and the Reframing of American Intellectual History

Abstract: This essay examines the broad impact of African American thought leadership on early American intellectual history. Though marginalized in many mainstream histories of American intellectual life–which often focus on the emergence of Black philosophers and Black professional historians later in the 19th century -- early national Black thinkers helped shape public understanding of critical ideas in American society and politics, including the meaning of citizenship and civil rights, emancipation and equality, and racial justice. African Americans also influenced public discourses on other key topics in American intellectual life, including the nature of human dignity and spiritual redemption in the Second Great Awakening, the meaning of Romanticism and Transcendentalism in American reform culture, and the authority of science and technology in antebellum society. Using the concept of thought leadership as a framing device to understand the power and impact of early Black ideas, I follow recent trends in the field of African American intellectual history that focus on that way that African American men and women became public authorities on key ideas and issues in American culture between the American Revolution and Civil War. Though they did not often occupy positions of educational, institutional, or legal power (the main provinces of intellectual leadership), Black thought leaders had a significant impact on early American intellectual history.

The New Clarity: Awakening in the Post-Truth Era

In the wake of Trump and Brexit, the late 2010s gave rise to an ambient sense of a post-truth crisis. It signals the social media fuelled breakdown of liberal democracy and its 'fourth estate' into fragmented and mutually antagonising epistemic media bubbles. Yet at the same time, the new online political movements driving this crisis became enthralled with the radical sense of waking up from a false reality to absolute Truth, ranging from new (con)spiritual fascinations with mystical clarity to far-right ideas about a Great Awakening and red-pilling. This article tries to make sense of this strange resurgence of 'awakening' and the experience of radical epistemic clarity from within post-truth culture. We argue that what we refer to as the New Clarity represents the bleeding edge of our current post-truth predicament, which at once intensifies 'postmodern' sentiments of cynicism, irony and play and breaks with them in the form of new political-epistemic radicalisms. To draw out this paradoxical relationship between post-truth and the New Clarity, we survey three historical dimensions of postmodernism as theorised by Lyotard and others at the closing of the 20th century, namely: cynicism and the crisis of critique, new spiritualities and authoritarian conspiracism, and the spiralling dialectic between neoliberalism and populism. Breaking down these dimensions to understand the New Clarity, we take the QAnon conspiracy movement as embodying its paradoxical logic. Doing so we offer a critical heuristic for charting the rise of new conspiratorial and spiritual Awakenings today.

The Great Awakening of the LDS-Mormon Art Scene

The Great Awakening of the LDS-Mormon Art Scene

Sermons That “Cut Like a Sword”: Samuel Blair’s Rhetoric During the Great Awakening

The article examines the style of Samuel Blair, a revival preacher of the Great Awakening who has often been omitted in the studies on the colonial pulpit tradition. Two texts by Blair, a sermon (A Perswasive to Repentance, 1743) and a revival account (A Short and Faithful Narrative, 1744) are studied rhetorically and presented as representative of the “rhetoric of the revival,” a particular mode of preaching in which the speaker employs a wide array of rhetorical patterns, biblical innuendos and communicative strategies aimed at eliciting emotional responses.

A New Great Awakening: Be Tradition of Radical Christian Discipleship and the Current Transformational Moment in the United States

A New Great Awakening: Be Tradition of Radical Christian Discipleship and the Current Transformational Moment in the United States

Daniel 12:7-12 and the Second Great Awakening

Daniel 12:7-12 and the Second Great Awakening

A Vivifying Spirit: Quaker Practice and Reform in Antebellum America by Janet Moore Lindman (review)

Reviewed by: A Vivifying Spirit: Quaker Practice and Reform in Antebellum America by Janet Moore Lindman Stephanie J. Richmond (bio) Keywords Quakerism, Society of Friends, Schisms, Faith, Reform A Vivifying Spirit: Quaker Practice and Reform in Antebellum America. By Janet Moore Lindman. (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022. Pp. 284. Cloth, $119.95.) Janet Moore Lindman's A Vivifying Spirit examines the increasingly complex world of doctrinal conflict among mid-Atlantic Quakers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The book, based on deep archival research, dives into the spiritual practices of American Quakers through a variety of lenses. Lindman argues that Quakers' responses to mainstream evangelical Protestantism shaped their engagement with social reform and their own history. The context Lindman provides for Quakers' debates over reform develops a historiographical thread in both American religious history and the history of antebellum reform examining the connections between reform and religious movements in early America. Despite the details that Lindman adds to the debate over the connections between religion and reform, the book at times struggles to find its footing and audience. The first part of the book examines the spiritual lifecycle of Quakers. After framing the general outlines of American Quaker beliefs in the opening chapter, Lindman takes us into the classrooms and catechism books of Quaker childhood. Quaker educational theory was particularly attentive to both the popular theorists of their time and the need to instill central Quaker values of piety, pacifism, and equality in children from a very young age. The last chapter in the section examines the spiritual practices of Quakers nearing the end of their lives and those of their loved ones. Embracing or easing suffering and grieving together after friends [End Page 355] and family passed—death was central to understanding Quaker faith. As Lindman remarks, "mindfulness dictated recurrent engagement with death to learn how to do it well" (64). These early chapters give a fascinating insight into the mental and religious lives of Quaker families across the spectrum of life stages. The second part of the book examines the impact of the various schisms and divisions within American Quaker meetings. The section opens with a chapter detailing the doctrinal differences between the Orthodox and Hicksite Quakers, who split apart over whether scripture or the inner light should drive one's faith. Orthodox Quakers, who cleaved to scripture, were accused of being influenced by evangelical Christianity and the need to fit into the vigorous Christianity of the Second Great Awakening. Hicksites read both scripture and the writings of early Quakers to assert the primacy of the inner light to Quaker devotion. The division between the two groups intensified, and new fractures appeared in the 1840s and 1850s when Joseph Burney began preaching around the United States, splitting the Orthodox Quakers into Burneyites and Wilburites. Burney, a British Quaker, questioned early Quaker teachings and brought Quakerism closer to the practices of evangelical Christian churches. John Wilbur asserted the importance of quietism and other Quaker practices and challenged Burneyite rejection of the inner light. The final chapter focuses on the disputes between reforming Quakers and those who thought that the right path was keeping separate from the larger political and cultural debates in the United States. This section, like the first, does an excellent job in explaining the impact of these schisms on the rank-and-file of mid-Atlantic Quakers. Through the words of Quaker pedestrians, we learn how they navigated the debates and chose their positions within them, even when friends and family may have taken the other side. The third section engages with how American Quakers applied their spiritual and religious teachings to their interaction with the secular world. This last section, along with the rather awkwardly positioned last chapter in the second part, is perhaps the least interesting for scholars of nineteenth-century America as it retreads familiar ground for scholars of abolitionism and other reform movements. The first chapter in the section examines Quaker print culture and Quakers' engagement in the broader reform print culture in early America. Here we hear more often from well-known historical figures including Lucretia Mott and her fellow abolitionists. [End Page 356] The final chapter...

And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle by Jon Meacham

Reviewed by: And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle by Jon Meacham Jon Diefenthaler And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle. By Jon Meacham. New York: Random House, 2022. 676 pp. Do we need another book on Abraham Lincoln? Among the multitude of others, what makes And There Was Light stand out is Jon Meacham's remarkable effort to let America's sixteenth President provide an illuminating perspective on a nation that is currently as deeply divided and struggling to survive as a democracy as it was before and during the Civil War. As helpful as this book may be for any American citizen to read, I am motivated to review it for this church-related journal because I believe the historical insights this noted author provides are potentially useful to Lutheran clergy and other ecclesiastical leaders seeking to navigate these same troubled waters and to address the socio-political divisions that continue to wash into their congregations and church bodies. Aptly subtitled "Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle," Meacham's book covers most of the bases one would expect to find in a comprehensive biography, including Lincoln's family of origin, his hardscrabble upbringing, his first love Ann Rutledge, his turbulent marriage to Mary Todd and the loss of two of their progeny, his elections to office, as well as his anguished presidency and subsequent assassination. But in most every chapter on Lincoln's life, Meacham chooses to give us a measure of insight into the role religion played as the Illinois rail splitter sought to deal with the towering and divisive problem of slavery. At work in Lincoln's mind, in Meacham's estimation, were history, reason, and faith. For him, the Constitution, which viewed slaves as the property of their owners, took a back seat in America's history to the Declaration of Independence, which unequivocally stated that "all men are created equal." In contrast to historians who have stated that Lincoln's opposition to slavery evolved, Meacham provides ample evidence to substantiate the president's later [End Page 188] conscience-grounded claim that it was always in his nature to believe that "if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong." As Meacham sees it, what evolved was Lincoln's continuous search for a reasonable political solution to the problem. While African colonization of slaves piqued his interest, this proposal quickly proved to be less than feasible. Recognizing that various legislative compromises would only extend the Southern slave empire, he felt compelled to oppose them. The political necessity of gaining the support of Whites in order to outlaw slavery prompted his willingness to concede that Blacks were an inferior breed. The "popular sovereignty" solution advocated by Stephen Douglas in his campaigns for office only seemed to fan the flames of self-interest and secession. What Meacham in fact demonstrates is that as Lincoln's reliance on reason waned and as "war came," his faith in God took on a much greater role. According to Meacham, Lincoln's "creed was of his own making—and it was always evolving with enormous consequences for the nation he led and for the nation he left behind" (xxxv). His piety included regular reading of the King James Bible and, at his most critical hours, getting on his knees to pray to God. At the same time, his reading of Thomas Paine's Age of Reason ("my own mind is my own church") made him a "doubting Thomas" among believers, and for this reason, he never became the member of a Christian congregation. Lincoln found some of the Evangelical Protestant beliefs featured by the Second Great Awakening, such as the divinity of Jesus, too difficult to embrace. Instead, he favored the brand of theology set forth by the New England Transcendentalists. Theodore Parker in particular helped him focus on Nature's God and to believe that the universe was inherently moral, and that its history arced in the direction of justice. Nevertheless, Meacham reveals elements of Lincoln's religion that coincide with those of the Christian faith. For one thing, he recognized the pervasiveness of human depravity. Persistent awareness of his own shortcomings prevented any consideration...

One Accident, One Mistake: Evangelicals, Religious Establishment, and American Political Development

It is widely conceded that the Supreme Court has struggled to create a coherent, consistent set of principles on which to base its decisions about the relationship between Church and State. This paper argues that what would help bring conceptual clarity to this contentious set of issues is a historically informed theory that can be labeled developmental, or structural. It presents such a theory by examining two sets of facts: First, a fact that most constitutional scholars have overlooked–that the Constitution and Bill of Rights were drafted and ratified during a period of relative religious calm in between periods of great evangelical fervor, namely the First and Second Great Awakenings (the “accident”). Second, as is well known, that the framers did not foresee the development of stable political parties (the “mistake”). This essay first briefly summarizes the state of the law in this area, and then examines the ways in which the Second Great Awakening combined this accident and this mistake to transform American culture and politics, including electoral politics, and the implications of that transformation.

Sacred Ground: Enslaved African Americans and the US Religious Freedom Paradigm

The traditional narrative of religious freedom from colonial British North America to the modern United States involves Protestant Pilgrims fleeing persecution and creating an unprecedented haven of religious tolerance in the New World.1 Scholars of African American religion Sabrina Dent and Corey D. B. Walker have characterized this narrative of religious freedom as “one of ascension,” due to its exceptional “development that has consistently expanded across the centuries.”2 This direction of development was guided by the constitutional space provided for religion in the First Amendment as well as the flourishing of new sects during the First and Second Great Awakenings. Dent and Walker are two of many scholars who have argued this assumed linear rise of religious liberty produces a compelling but noncomprehensive account of the religious freedom in the United States.3 Two problems arise from this narrative of linear ascension. The first is a problem of sample and the second is an issue of scope. While the story of early colonial settlers who championed religious tolerance is certainly a piece of the history of religious freedom in the United States, their struggle for religious freedom too often obscures the religious rights of historically underrepresented US populations, including enslaved persons, Native Americans, and immigrants. Because these groups were so often deprived of rights beyond religious freedom, it can be easy to consider their experiences with religious freedom as fringe compared to the “core” of the narrative of religious freedom in the United States.4 Yet, these groups must also be included in the sampling of the nation’s religious experience to craft a representative and richer narrative. Reflecting on the lived realities of those lacking religious freedom can illuminate experiences of other groups denied religious freedom and help modern lawmakers avoid similar mistakes.

Titus Coan: "Apostle to the Sandwich Islands." by Phil Corr (review)

Reviewed by: Titus Coan: "Apostle to the Sandwich Islands." by Phil Corr Clifford Putney Titus Coan: "Apostle to the Sandwich Islands." By Phil Corr. (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock. 2021. Pp. 513. $60.00. ISBN: 978-1-6667-1393-0). In the annals of missionary history, few places were evangelized as thoroughly as Hawaii (the Sandwich Islands), where missionaries from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (Congregational/Presbyterian) converted the bulk of the populace to Christianity in the 1800s. Generally intolerant of native Hawaiian customs and beliefs, ABCFM missionaries on the islands were definitely not broad-minded by the standards of today. They were at the forefront of progressive nineteenth-century movements such as abolitionism, however, and they were exceptionally well educated for their day (the women as well as the men). They also included intellectually curious individuals such as the Reverend Titus Coan (1801–1882), whom Phil Corr writes about in his absorbing new biography, Titus Coan: "Apostle to the Sandwich Islands." That Coan is the worthy subject of a biography cannot be denied. A Presbyterian missionary in Hilo on Hawaii (the big island) for forty-eight years (1835–1882), he was a powerful preacher, and he was a prolific writer, with a gift for describing people and places. He was also an ardent revivalist, and he did more than anyone else to instigate the Great Awakening in Hawaii (1836–1840), a [End Page 433] period during which tens of thousands of Hawaiians converted to Christianity. On a Sunday in 1838, at the height of the Awakening, Coan used a bucket and paintbrush to baptize 1,705 adults, whom he subsequently made members of his church in Hilo. The church had over 7,000 members in 1841, and Coan could boast of it being the largest church in the world at that time. In addition to being a successful evangelist, Coan was a skillful (albeit amateur) scientist, and he made important discoveries in the field of vulcanology. As a resident of Hawaii (one of the most geologically active islands in the world), Coan experienced earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions, and he provided detailed descriptions of them for missionary publications and leading scientific journals. He also made innumerable trips to Mauna Loa and Kilauea (the island's two active volcanos), and he risked death on many of those trips. Most people avoid erupting volcanoes, but Coan (who possessed a strong physique and a fearless nature) liked to climb them, even when plumes of red-hot lava were splashing down around him. For his biography of Coan, Phil Corr spent years doing research, relying on published works (especially Coan's autobiography) and unpublished materials, such as letters. From these materials, Corr provides readers with a richly comprehensive portrait of Coan ("the bishop of Kilauea"), encompassing the missionary's childhood on a farm in Connecticut, his conversion during America's Second Great Awakening, his acquaintance with the famous revivalist Charles Finney, his experimental mission in the wilds of Patagonia (1833–1834), his clashes with conservative members of the ABCFM (who opposed Coan's style of revivalism), his two marriages (the latter to a woman thirty-three years his junior), his successful outreach to white sailors, his participation in the American peace movement, his two-year (1870–1871) tour of America (where he was greeted by crowds that sometimes numbered in the thousands), and his long presidency (1863–1882) of the Hawaiian Evangelical Association, the successor body to the ABCFM in Hawaii. Throughout his biography of Coan, Corr expresses admiration for the man and his work. Corr is an evangelical pastor (just as Coan was), and he rarely provides secular explanations for religious phenomena, preferring instead to take the religious phenomena at face value. Doubtlessly this will frustrate secular readers of his book, but even they might well come away from the volume with a liking for Coan, who was not a toxic missionary of the sort found in novels such as The Poisonwood Bible. Rather than being harshly judgmental and arrogant, Coan was a deeply caring individual, and he won the enduring love of people around him. Clifford Putney Bentley University [End Page 434] Clifford Putney Bentley University Copyright...

This Earthly Frame: The Making of American Secularism by David Sehat

Reviewed by: This Earthly Frame: The Making of American Secularism by David Sehat Mark Mattes This Earthly Frame: The Making of American Secularism. By David Sehat. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. x + 330 pp. Cultural and intellectual historian David Sehat argues that American secularism developed as a way to honor religious pluralism. Secularism is a product of inter-religious conflict in public life. Over decades such disputes helped to carve out a secular public square. While the Bill of Rights allowed no "establishment of religion" some states retained an established church in some cases for decades after the ratification of the Bill of Rights. Sehat distinguishes "negative secularism" in which the state holds no hostility toward a religion but the authority of the religion has no standing outside of its own community, from a "positive secularism" that actively establishes unbelief (4). For Sehat, negative secularism is no abandonment of belief but instead a commitment to the privatization of religious ideas (4). Conservative Roman Catholic thinkers see such a perspective as inherently Protestant, and not acceptable. Sehat responds that this criticism would fail to account for its support by many Jews and its opposition by many conservative Protestants (5). Sehat's work describes how the Supreme Court from the 1880s until today mostly undermined the hegemony of Evangelicalism's influence on public life, an influence due to the Second Great Awakening. Evangelicalism's influence was weakened due to Jehovah's Witnesses securing their right to proselytize and not salute the flag, the overturning of Prohibition, the debate over public subsidies for Catholic schools, the expulsion of religious devotions from public schools, and the legalization of abortion and same-sex marriage. Sehat presents a detailed history of each case and how the courts handled them. Even so, the story is mostly one of calling [End Page 122] out Evangelical privilege, overturning it, relegating Evangelical or other religious perspectives to a private realm, thereby creating a pluralistic society. That said, there is no doubt that those committed to creating a secular ethos saw their work in virtually eschatological terms in which the progressive, liberating forces of good triumph over the regressive, repressive forces of religion. For John Dewey, unless the world is governed by a non-religious secularism we have a "systematic stultification of the human mind" (117). Unfortunately, Sehat fails to take up the work of a thinker like Robert H. Nelson in Economics as Religion (2001) who documents that democratic capitalism is thoroughly saturated with postmillennial utopian mythology, indebted to, even an avatar of, a religious perspective. The case can be made that no public space exists that is devoid of myth. A blip in the secularist advance is the challenge by Catholic hospitals to the Affordable Care Act over a requirement that would force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions, a worrisome development for Sehat since it permits private religious sensibilities to gain currency in public life (260). Interestingly, up through the 1960s and 1970s, most court decisions favoring secularism were based on the "right to privacy," arguing for individual freedom in private lives without interference from the government. However, since the 1970s, a different, contradictory focus has advanced: the personal is the political, which believes that only by forcing the question of recognition will certain disenfranchised groups, such as gays and lesbians, gain acceptance (221). Surprisingly, religious conservatives increasingly claim disenfranchisement and entitlement. This reviewer questions whether Sehat's perspective undercuts the value of civil associations. Sehat criticizes groups like the American Bible Society as fronts of Protestant imperialism. The implication is that civil associations, especially ones with a religious flavor, threaten individual autonomy; only the state then can protect individuals from such coercive power. But is this true? For example, would congregations of any confession threaten individual autonomy? Sehat's valorization of "autonomy" ignores the idea that humans find meaning and friendship precisely in associations centered on common goals that promote give and take among their members. Overall, such associations enhance civil behavior. The [End Page 123] quest for autonomy or individual liberty assumes that such civic associations are robust and vital. Sehat's vision of America seems to be one where such civil associations potentially jeopardize individual...