Reviewed by: Household Gods: The Religious Lives of the Adams Family by Sara Georgini Katherine Carté Household Gods: The Religious Lives of the Adams Family. By Sara Georgini. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 296 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. In 1798, President John Adams wrote to the Massachusetts militia: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”1 These words have had an enduring role in discussions of faith and the nation’s founding; even surrounded by quotation marks, these lines today yield upward of 28,000 hits in a Google search. The religious attitudes, habits, and even the stray comments of those within the pantheon of the “founding fathers” continue to draw remarkable attention. Often, investigations of these figures’ beliefs concerning religion fall into the category of ahistorical hagiography, regardless of whether they are intended to demonstrate their subjects’ orthodox piety or their tolerant liberality. Rarely do such studies take the opportunity of using a founder’s fame to shed light on broader religious trends, such as the evolving way religious elites confronted both confessional traditions and the nation’s growing religious diversity. In this context, Sara Georgini’s Household Gods: The Religious Lives of the Adams Family is truly a breath of fresh air. In a clearly written book intended for a wide audience, Georgini surveys the religious educations and practices of multiple generations of the prominent Massachusetts Adams family, spanning the seventeenth through early twentieth centuries. Along the way, she introduces readers to the evolution in theological perspectives of New England’s elites from providentially minded Puritans to cosmopolitan cultural critics. Each of the book’s chapters focuses on an era and a religious perspective representative of its protagonists. Household Gods begins chapter 1 with the story of the family’s progenitor, English Puritan Henry Adams, who migrated from Somerset in southwestern England to Braintree, Massachusetts in the late 1630s. Henry left few clear articulations of his thoughts and intentions or of his personal investment in the Puritan movement, but Georgini ably places him within the broad trends of the Puritan Great Migration that followed Archbishop William Laud’s religious persecutions. “Rather than functioning as a monolithic structure,” she writes, “Puritanism was able to spread largely because worshippers could seize on different messages and themes” (12–13). The theme for Henry, particularly as he built a life for his family in Massachusetts, was providentialism: he [End Page 651] believed the English had a divine responsibility to bring pure Protestantism to a safe harbor, away from the dangers of European corruption. Public service and national mission thus characterized the Adamses’ religious perspective from their earliest days in North America. Georgini uses the theme of providentialism to connect Henry to his great-grandson, the John Adams who rose to become the second U.S. president. Though this thread helps tie the two men together, it does as a result foreclose any detailed discussion of religious developments in New England during the eighteenth century, including the transformation of staunch Puritans into enlightened Unitarians. Providentialism undoubtedly remained powerful, however, and for John Adams it became first a source of confidence during the American Revolution and then a font of disappointment when, later in life, he contrasted his career’s shortcomings to his earlier aspirations for the nation. His anxiety about the religious condition of the United States in the early 1800s motivated his desperate assertion of the need for a “moral and religious people” for the Constitution’s survival. As Georgini argues, “John regarded his failure to translate New England Christianity to the national stage as one in an epic series of setbacks that plagued his family circle. His zeal to apply providentialist guidelines and to align Americans with the practices of godly republicanism had, in Adams’s mind, triggered his descent from political grace” (36) after his electoral loss in 1800. With this insightful comment, Household Gods transitions from largely reinforcing popular narratives about Protestant faith in early America to prodding those assumptions in new directions—away from mythic origins and toward change over time. While most of the subsequent Adamses remained within the elite Unitarianism that...
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Nov 1, 2022
Zulfikar Yusuf 
Open Access
