Skepticism and American Faith: from the Revolution to the Civil War - Hardcover

Grasso, Christopher

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0190494379 ISBN 13: 9780190494377

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2018

Synopsis

Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, the dialogue of religious skepticism and faith shaped struggles over the place of religion in politics. It produced different visions of knowledge and education in an "enlightened" society. It fueled social reform in an era of economic transformation, territorial expansion, and social change. Ultimately, as Christopher Grasso argues in this definitive work, it molded the making and eventual unmaking of American nationalism.

Religious skepticism has been rendered nearly invisible in American religious history, which often stresses the evangelicalism of the era or the "secularization" said to be happening behind people's backs, or assumes that skepticism was for intellectuals and ordinary people who stayed away from church were merely indifferent. Certainly the efforts of vocal "infidels" or "freethinkers" were dwarfed by the legions conducting religious revivals, creating missions and moral reform societies, distributing Bibles and Christian tracts, and building churches across the land. Even if few Americans publicly challenged Christian truth claims, many more quietly doubted, and religious skepticism touched--and in some cases transformed--many individual lives. Commentators considered religious doubt to be a persistent problem, because they believed that skeptical challenges to the grounds of faith--the Bible, the church, and personal experience--threatened the foundations of American society.

Skepticism and American Faith examines the ways that Americans--ministers, merchants, and mystics; physicians, schoolteachers, and feminists; self-help writers, slaveholders, shoemakers, and soldiers--wrestled with faith and doubt as they lived their daily lives and tried to make sense of their world.

About this title

About the Author

Christopher Grasso is professor of history at the College of William and Mary and was the editor of the William and Mary Quarterly. He is the author of A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut and the editor of Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso's Civil War.

Review

"Erudite and meticulously researched....By focusing on people's lived experiences, Grasso convincingly shows that skepticism was not just an attitude embraced by an intellectual elite but was a perspective that appealed to a broad spectrum of antebellum society, including women, free blacks, and enslaved peoples. He takes the perspectives of his historical subjects seriously, reconstructing their ideas, practices, and experiences." -- Anthon M. Matytsin, Journal of Religion

"Learned and imaginative... Christopher Grasso challenges the conventional wisdom about belief and unbelief in the United States in the early American republic...Skepticism and American Faith succeeds not only as an intellectual history but also as a work of lived religion-and lived irreligion-through its vivid sketches of seekers across the spiritual spectrum." -- Christine Leigh Heyrman, American Historical Review

"Grasso unearthed a treasure trove of material from mostly obscure personages who entered the fray with a fury shortly after the American Revolution ... the story is well worth telling, and Grasso does a marvelous job in laying it out for curious readers." -- F. G. Kirkpatrick, CHOICE

"Monumental... Skepticism and American Faith is one of the most inventive studies of the religious environment of America between the revolution and the Civil War in some time." -- Seth Perry, Church History

"Christopher Grasso has pursued what other historians have considered by-ways in order to show that deism, skepticism, and religious doubt were anything but marginal in the formative decades of the United States. Deep research, intelligent organization, and persuasive argumentation make this book one of the very best in the recent outpouring of outstanding studies explaining 'religious America' between the founding and the Civil War."--Mark A. Noll, author of America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln

"Questioning the overworked distinction between the religious and the secular, Grasso explores the dense entanglements of skepticism and faith that shaped so much of American religious and political life. Even as evangelicalism waxed strong in the new nation, freethinking suspicions could not be banished and kept eating away (often from within) at the particularities of the Christian gospel. The very subtlety of Grasso's story raises considerable doubt about any trust we yet place in such grand narrative devices as secularization and Christianization."--Leigh Eric Schmidt, Washington University in St. Louis

"Americans have often assumed that the United States was founded on faith. But in this landmark history, Christopher Grasso argues that doubt was far more prevalent than many observers have cared to admit. Drawing on a vast array of sources, Grasso reveals that a lively dialogue between faith and skepticism characterized the entire period from the Revolution to the Civil War not only at the public level but also in the personal lives of individuals both famous and obscure. Anyone who has ever wondered about the status of (ir)religion in American society will need to wrestle with this remarkable book."--Peter J. Thuesen, author of Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine

"A magisterial study of the entangled threads of faith and skepticism that have run so prominently through America's history. In Grasso's deft reading, faith and disbelief in nineteenth-century America were not opposite poles of experience but a spiritual and psychological continuum along which many people traveled. The cast of characters is epic and in tracking the personal journeys of men and women into and out of faith, Grasso recreates a vibrant world of skeptics, scoffers, and the simply indifferent who for too long have lived in the scholarly shadow of their more famous evangelical counterparts."--Susan Juster, author of Sacred Violence in Early America

"Revealing...Grasso's book demonstrates the centrality of skepticism in understanding how the American inclination to faith has been 'forged in the foundry of culture."--Publishers Weekly

"A revealing look at religion in the new nation...Grasso's book shines a light on an aspect of America's cultural history that is too often neglected....These efforts and disputes [between skepticism and faith], Mr. Grasso contends, were at the center the country's search for a self-definition."-- D.G. HART, Wall Street Journal

"Grasso draws on an avalanche of research to challenge conventional wisdom about the 'lived religious experiences' of American Protestants. Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, he demonstrates, deism, doubt, skepticism and even infidelity were often hidden in plain sight... 'Skepticism and American Faith' is, dare I say it, one hell of a book. As he brings back to life a vast cast of characters, many of them long forgotten, as they struggled with faith and doubt, Grasso adds immeasurably to our understanding of American history and culture."-Glenn C. Altschuler, Tulsa World

"Grasso unearthed a treasure trove of material from mostly obscure personages who entered the fray with a fury shortly after the American Revolution... the story is well worth telling, and Grasso does a marvelous job in laying it out for curious readers."- Choice

"In Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War, historian Christopher Grasso contends that a persistent dialogue between skepticism and Christianity indelibly shaped the antebellum United States. With an eye for colorful characters-mechanics, preachers, housewives, reformers, slaveholders, soldiers, and many more-Grasso makes his case in admirable if sometimes excruciating detail. Readers will learn of Methodist preachers whose private doubts mushroomed into publicly scandalous unbelief, of self-proclaimed infidels lurching into Christian faith, of competing churches that painted each other as engines of infidelity, of pro-slavery clergymen who linked infidelity and abolitionism to form the dominant (white) Christianity of the South, and of abolitionist preachers who shaped US nationalism by warning against the national sins of slavery and unbelief." -- Reading Religion

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0190494379
• ISBN 13: 9780190494377
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 664