Evangelicals And Politics In Antebellum America

"A book of uncommon significance, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America compels us to rethink the causes for the Civil War and once again place the moral issue of slavery at the heart of the matter". -- Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Journal of Southern History "This superbly researched and expertly written book makes a signal contribution to American history as well as to the history of religion". -- Mark Noll, Christianity Today "Carwardine's book is a major contribution to our understanding of pre-Civil War politics.... Few, after reading this sophisticated account, will deny the important role evangelicals played in shaping mid-nineteenth-century American political culture".-Curtis D. Johnson, American Historical Review This book, first published in 1993 to great acclaim, examines the relationship between evangelical Protestant piety and political life in the critical twenty years before the Civil War. It is the first study to address directly the questions of how effectively evangelicals engaged in secular politics, how far they fashioned American political culture and party developments, and how instrumental they were in shaping the lines of sectional antagonism. Richard Carwardine explores the complex character of the evangelical movement and its impact during the antebellum era. He reveals how evangelicals, both North and South, re-inforced the drive toward two-party, adversarial politics by encouraging voting and responsible citizenship, pressuring politicians, and forcing questions of education, the removal of Native Americans, war, drink, and, above all, slavery onto the political agenda. This book goes further than any previous study to argue that religion was thecoin of politics in the early 1800s and that the roots of the Civil War lay in religious as well as secular factors.

Ghosts. Railroads. Sing Sing. Sex machines. These are just a few of the phenomena that appear in John Lardas Modern’s pioneering account of religion and society in nineteenth-century America. This book uncovers surprising connections between secular ideology and the rise of technologies that opened up new ways of being religious. Exploring the eruptions of religion in New York’s penny presses, the budding fields of anthropology and phrenology, and Moby-Dick, Modern challenges the strict separation between the religious and the secular that remains integral to discussions about religion today. Modern frames his study around the dread, wonder, paranoia, and manic confidence of being haunted, arguing that experiences and explanations of enchantment fueled secularism’s emergence. The awareness of spectral energies coincided with attempts to tame the unruly fruits of secularism—in the cultivation of a spiritual self among Unitarians, for instance, or in John Murray Spear’s erotic longings for a perpetual motion machine. Combining rigorous theoretical inquiry with beguiling historical arcana, Modern unsettles long-held views of religion and the methods of narrating its past.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A thwarted love triangle of heartbreak rediscovered after almost two hundred years—two men and a woman of equal ambition—that exploded in scandal and investigation, set between America's Revolution and its Civil War, revealing an age in subtle and powerful transformation, caught between the fight for women's rights and the campaign waged by evangelical Protestants to dominate the nation's culture and politics. From the winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize in History. At its center—and the center of a love triangle—Martha Parker, a gifted young New England woman, smart, pretty, ambitious, determined to make the most of her opportunities, aspiring to become an educator and a foreign missionary. Late in 1825, Martha accepted a proposal from a schoolmaster, Thomas Tenney, only to reject him several weeks later for a rival suitor, a clergyman headed for the mission field, Elnathan Gridley. Tenney's male friends, deeply resentful of the new prominence of women in academies, benevolent and reform associations, and the mission field, decided to retaliate on Tenney's behalf by sending an anonymous letter to the head of the foreign missions board impugning Martha's character. Tenney further threatened Martha with revealing even more about their relationship, thereby ruining her future prospects as a missionary. The head of the board began an inquiry into the truth of the claims about Martha, and in so doing, collected letters, diaries, depositions, and firsthand witness accounts of Martha's character. The ruin of Martha Parker's hopes provoked a resistance within evangelical ranks over womanhood, manhood, and, surprisingly, homosexuality, ultimately threatening to destroy the foreign missions enterprise.

Since Perry Miller's 1940 essay on the connection between Puritan theology and Transcendentalism, "From Edwards to Emerson," there has been a dominant model for thinking about the relationship between American religion and nature. According to Miller, Emerson and his fellow New England elites were the only ones during the antebellum period to turn to nature for a direct, unmediated access to spirituality; this was part of their protest against the orthodoxy of Protestantism. We would, however, misunderstand the past if we forgot that New England Transcendentalists, as important as they are to American intellectual history, were an elite minority. There were other religious groups who also turned to the field and stream, the stone and the tree, in their everyday religious practice and their theology. Evangelical Christianity was the popular religion of antebellum America. During this period, evangelical relationships to the material world, and to nature at large, were closer to Catholicism than one might expect. Brett Malcolm Grainger makes two important arguments in this book: (1) early republic Evangelicals represent an important, non-derivative, and popular strand of American religious engagement with nature, a story often ignored while focusing on Emerson and Thoreau; and (2) the everyday religion of antebellum American Evangelicals shows us that the Catholic-Protestant divide over real presence needs to be reconsidered. Evangelical enchantment can be seen in field sermons, camp meetings, water cures, outdoor baptisms, and mesmerism. Grainger sheds light on a major religious movement that swept across antebellum America from Virginia, Kentucky, and Appalachia to Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and upstate New York.--

Emerson and the Transcendentalists get credit for revolutionizing religious life in America by introducing a new appreciation of nature. But in this reconsideration of faith in the antebellum period, Brett Malcolm Grainger argues that it was Evangelical revivalists who transformed everyday religious life and spiritualized the natural environment.

W. Jason Wallace examines three antebellum groups and argues that the divisions among them stemmed from disagreements over the role that religious convictions played in a free society.

This timely book investigates the increasing visibility and influence of evangelical Christians in recent American politics with a focus on racial justice. Peter Goodwin Heltzel considers four evangelical social movements: Focus on the Family, the National Association of Evangelicals, Christian Community Development Association, and Sojourners. The political motives and actions of evangelical groups are founded upon their conceptions of Jesus Christ, Heltzel contends. He traces the roots of contemporary evangelical politics to the prophetic black Christianity tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the socially engaged evangelical tradition of Carl F. H. Henry. Heltzel shows that the basic tenets of King's and Henry's theologies have led their evangelical heirs toward a prophetic evangelicalism in a shade of blue green--blue symbolizing the tragedy of black suffering in the Americas, and green symbolizing the hope of a prophetic evangelical engagement with poverty, AIDS, and the environment. This fresh theological understanding of evangelical political groups shines new light on the ways evangelicals shape and are shaped by broader American culture.

A leading historian of evangelicalism offers a concise history of evangelicals and how they became who they are today Evangelicalism is arguably America’s most controversial religious movement. Nonevangelical people who follow the news may have a variety of impressions about what “evangelical” means. But one certain association they make with evangelicals is white Republicans. Many may recall that 81 percent of self†‘described white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump, and they may well wonder at the seeming hypocrisy of doing so. In this illuminating book, Thomas Kidd draws on his expertise in American religious history to retrace the arc of this spiritual movement, illustrating just how historically peculiar that political and ethnic definition (white Republican) of evangelicals is. He examines distortions in the public understanding of evangelicals, and shows how a group of “Republican insider evangelicals” aided the politicization of the movement. This book will be a must†‘read for those trying to better understand the shifting religious and political landscape of America today.