Religion In A Revolutionary Age

Religion in a Revolutionary Age explores the rich variety and enormous complexity of religious experience in early America. Eleven essays address two broad themes: the role of religion in the Revolutionary upheaval itself and the influence of religion on the shaping of America's governing institutions. This broad focus both expands our understanding of the eighteenth century and carries implications for contemporary society. The two opening essays present contrasting assessments of religious experience in the British North American colonies. Jon Butler maintains that coercive authority was the foundation of all religious expression in the colonies, pointing to the importance of church-state relations and the institutional strength, sophistication, and authority of religious denominations. Patricia U. Bonomi contends that most of the colonists were Dissenters and thus at odds with traditional English values, both religiously and politically. The following four essays study the religious experiences of women, blacks, workers, and evangelicals in Revolutionary America. Elaine Forman Crane explores the religious motivations and actions of women and their consequent impact on the political process. Sylvia R. Frey discusses the formative periods of African-American Christianity in the South. Ronald Schultz evaluates the role of religion among Philadelphia's working class in the years after the Revolution. And Robert M. Calhoon studies evangelicalism in the South, particularly its impact on Revolutionary politics, its attempt to reconcile republicanism and Christianity, its congregational discipline, and its sermons. Several contributors then examine the relationship between religion and the political culture of the new nation. Stephen A. Marini analyzes the influence of religion on politics by focusing on the delegates to the state conventions called to ratify the new federal Constitution. Approaching the issue of religion and politics in the Revolutionary era from a different perspective, Edwin S. Gaustad outlines the provisions regulating religion in the state constitutions, the federal Constitution, and the Northwest Ordinance. M. L. Bradbury discusses the creation of structures of governance by three denominations - Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Baptists - in the decades of the Revolutionary era and after. Paul K. Conkin's essay explores implications of the fact that the American Revolution was not paralleled by a religious revolution. In the final essay, Ruth H. Bloch reexamines the debate over Revolutionary ideology that currently rages in American Revolutionary historiography. She looks at the relative influence of community-centered civic humanism and individualistic classical liberalism and their impact on the cultural life of Revolutionary America - particularly the areas of religious and family issues.

Essays that explore how Protestants responded to the opportunities and perils of revolution in the transatlantic age Revolution as Reformation: Protestant Faith in the Age of Revolutions, 1688–1832 highlights the role that Protestantism played in shaping both individual and collective responses to revolution. These essays explore the various ways that the Protestant tradition, rooted in a perpetual process of recalibration and reformulation, provided the lens through which Protestants experienced and understood social and political change in the Age of Revolutions. In particular, they call attention to how Protestants used those changes to continue or accelerate the Protestant imperative of refining their faith toward an improved vision of reformed religion. The editors and contributors define faith broadly: they incorporate individuals as well as specific sects and denominations, and as much of “life experience” as possible, not just life within a given church. In this way, the volume reveals how believers combined the practical demands of secular society with their personal faith and how, in turn, their attempts to reform religion shaped secular society. The wide-ranging essays highlight the exchange of Protestant thinkers, traditions, and ideas across the Atlantic during this period. These perspectives reveal similarities between revolutionary movements across and around the Atlantic. The essays also emphasize the foundational role that religion played in people’s attempts to make sense of their world, and the importance they placed on harmonizing their ideas about religion and politics. These efforts produced novel theories of government, encouraged both revolution and counterrevolution, and refined both personal and collective understandings of faith and its relationship to society.

The Church of the Revolutionary Age: Facing New Destinies is the eighth installment in Henri Daniel-Rops' History of the Church of Christ. This volume focuses on the momentous political events of the age: (1) The French Revolution and its effects on the Church and influence across Europe in developing radical ideals and parties. (2) The bitter struggle for sovereignty between "sword and spirit" in the Napoleonic era, culminating in the kidnapping of Pope Pius VII. (3) The perilous effort to rebuild and restore society amid the ruinous aftermath of that conflict-a drama of concordats and counter-revolution; of restoration of religion and regimes of uneasy alliance between Throne and Altar; of emancipation and rebellion; with the voices of geniuses like de Maistre and Lamennais, Chateaubriand and Consalvi, Pope Gregory XVI and O'Connell, dictating and defying, in turn, the flow of the revolutionary currents. The epoch of 1789 to 1870, which had opened with the fratricidal fanfare of revolution, saw the Church face a seemingly endless succession of perils. Presented in arresting detail and with dramatic flair by Daniel-Rops, the evidence of The Church of the Revolutionary Age: Facing New Destinies proves that those dangerous afflictions were "as pruning is to a tree." And thus pruned, "the Church in an age of revolution became a Church of sanctity."

Paine's years of study and reflection on the role of religion in society culminated with this, his final work. An attack on revealed religion from the deist point of view -- embodied by Paine's credo, "I believe in one God, and no more" -- its critical and objective examination of Old and New Testaments cites numerous contradictions.

"An incisive study of the Western world’s shift from institutional religion to more personal beliefs in the second half of the 19th century . . . This is intellectual history at its most comprehensive and convincing." —Publishers Weekly, starred review The late nineteenth century was an age of grand ideas and great expectations fueled by rapid scientific and technological innovation. In Europe, the ancient authority of church and crown was overthrown for the volatile gambles of democracy and the capitalist market. If it was an age that claimed to liberate women, slaves, and serfs, it also harnessed children to its factories and subjected entire peoples to its empires. Amid this tumult, another sea change was underway: the religious revolution. In The Religious Revolution, Dominic Green charts this profound cultural and political shift, taking us on a whirlwind journey through the lives and ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman; of Éliphas Lévi and Helena Blavatsky; of Wagner and Nietzsche; of Marx, Darwin, and Gandhi. Challenged by the industrialization, globalization, and political unrest of their times, these figures found themselves connecting with the religious impulse in surprising new ways, inspiring others to move away from the strictures of religion and toward the thrill and intimacy of spirituality. The modern era is often characterized as a time of increasing secularism, but in this trenchant new work, Green demonstrates how the foundations of modern society were laid as much by spirituality as by science or reason. The Religious Revolution is a narrative tour de force that sweeps across several continents and five of the most turbulent and formative decades in history. Threading together seemingly disparate intellectual trajectories, Green illuminates how philosophers, grifters, artists, scientists, and yogis shared in a global cultural moment, borrowing one another’s beliefs and making the world we know today.

Why do Christians not see that the prevailing spirit of our times has its origin and raison d'etre in a rejection of revealed truth? Why do they not see that the overthrow of the religious, political, and social order was not the result of a revolutionary blip, but of a revolutionary condition, and that perpetual revolution always has been and always will be the inevitable consequence of the denial of man's dependence on the god of nature, history and the Gospel? Why do they not see that this evil cannot be brought to an end by merely attacking the symptoms? It has to be torn up by the roots. Why do they not see that the only antidote for systematic unbelief is faith? Why do they not see that the anti-revolutionary principle is nothing other than the Protestant Christian principle, the Reformation principle? It alone, through the Gospel, can realize whatever there is of truth and goodness in these revolutionary utopias, and so save both church and state. - from cover material.