No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
RELIGION IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC: A SECOND TOM PAINE EFFECT
Review products
Eric R.Schlereth, An Age of Infidels: The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)
Jonathan J.Den Hartog, Patriotism and Piety: Federalist Politics and Religious Struggle in the New American Nation (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015)
SamHaselby, The Origins of American Religious Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 October 2016
Extract
Tom Paine, it turns out, may have done almost as much to shape public discourse in the early national period of the United States as he did in moving aggrieved colonists to take up arms against King George III in the Revolutionary period. As historians have documented time and again, the arguments in Paine's Common Sense (1776), especially “On Monarchy and Hereditary Succession,” worked as an elixir to transform mixed opinions about dealing with Parliamentary overreach into an unalloyed determination to throw off the king. The four books reviewed here point to the same sort of conclusion about the importance of Paine's The Age of Reason, published in two parts in 1794 and 1795 and then reprinted almost as often over the next few years as Common Sense had been at the outset of the War of Independence. With the latter work, however, Paine accomplished more through the opposition he generated than by the readers he convinced. Although a few doughty Loyalists had ventured to take on Common Sense, that opposition was as nothing compared to the groundswell of denunciation that arose in the 1790s to defuse what Americans of many stripes considered Paine's incendiary provocations. Thoroughly researched and persuasively argued monographs from Eric Schlereth, Jonathan Den Hartog, and Sam Haselby provide, in effect, an account of why The Age of Reason caused such a stir, how those who regarded its arguments as threatening damnation for individuals and poison for the republic mobilized for their own counterpurposes, and then what resulted from the ambiguous success that this mobilization achieved.
Information
- Type
- Review Essays
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016
References
1 Perl-Rosenthal, Nathan R., “The ‘Divine Right of Republics’: Hebriac Republicanism and the Debate over Kingless Government in Revolutionary America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 66/3 (2009), 535–64;Google Scholar Nelson, Eric, “Hebraism and the Republican Turn in 1776: A Contemporary Account of the Debate over Common Sense ,” William and Mary Quarterly, 70/4 (2013), 781–812;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Byrd, James P., Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution (New York, 2013), 71 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 202–3 n. 81.
2 Paine The Age of Reason, in Selected Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Ian Shapiro and Jane C. Calvert (New Haven, 2014), 372–417, at 382.
3 Grasso, Christopher, “Deist Common Sense in the Wake of the American Revolution,” Journal of American History, 95/1 (2008), 43–68;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Porterfield, Amanda, Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation (Chicago, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Schlereth thus counters arguments that highlight elitist responsibility for the new nation's religious character, as in Sehat, David, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (New York, 2011)Google Scholar; and Green, Steven K., Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding (New York, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 199–241 (“The Birth of a Myth”).
5 Fischer, David Hackett, The Revolution of American Conservatisim: The Federalist Party in the Era of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York, 1965)Google Scholar.
6 Hatch, Nathan O., The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, 1989)Google Scholar.
7 See especially Andrews, Dee, The Mehtodists and Revolutionary America, 1760–1800 (Princeton, 2000)Google Scholar; Wigger, John H. and Hatch, Nathan O., eds., Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America (Nashville, 2001);Google Scholar and Wigger, John H., American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists (New York, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Haselby, along with Schlereth, makes full use of insights from the pioneering work of Nord, David Paul, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (New York, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Howe, Daniel Walker, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York, 2007)Google Scholar; Johnson, Curtis D., Redeeming America: Evangelicals and the Road to Civil War (Chicago, 1993)Google Scholar.
10 Miller, Perry, “The Garden of Eden and the Deacon's Meadow,” American Heritage, 7/1 (1955), 54–61, 102, at 54Google Scholar.
11 Extensive documentation for such identifications is also provided by Byrd, Sacred Scripture, Sacred War; and Dreisbach, Daniel L., “The Bible and the Political Culture of the American Revolution,” in Dreisbach, Daniel L. and Hall, Mark David, eds., Faith and the Founders of the American Republic (New York, 2014), 144–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
12 Shalev makes especially good use of Prothero, Stephen, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (New York, 2003);Google Scholar and Wightman Fox, Richard, Jesus in America: A History (San Francisco, 2004)Google Scholar.
13 Oshatz, Molly, “The Problem of Moral Progress: The Slavery Debates and the Development of Liberal Protestantism in the United States,” Modern Intellectual History, 5/2 (2008), 225–50;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Oshatz, Slavery and Sin: The Fight against Slavery and the Rise of Liberal Protestantism (New York, 2012).
14 Hills, Margaret T., The English Bible in America: A Bibliography of Editions of the Bible and the New Teatment Published in America, 1777–1957 (New York, 1962), 1–105.Google Scholar