Sectarianism and Orestes Brownson in the American Religious Marketplace

Ángel Cortés

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783319518770
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

This book reveals the origins of the American religious marketplace by examining the life and work of reformer and journalist Orestes Brownson (1803-1876). Grounded in a wide variety of sources, including personal correspondence, journalistic essays, book reviews, and speeches, this work argues that religious sectarianism profoundly shaped participants in the religious marketplace. Brownson is emblematic of this dynamic because he changed his religious identity seven times over a quarter of a century. Throughout, Brownson waged a war of words opposing religious sectarianism. By the 1840s, however, a corrosive intellectual environment transformed Brownson into an arch religious sectarian. The book ends with a consideration of several explanations for Brownson's religious mobility, emphasizing the goad of sectarianism as the most salient catalyst for change.

Table of contents

• Sectarianism and Orestes Brownson in the American Religious Marketplace
• 1 Preface
• 2 An Age of ‘Crisis and Discontinuity’: Brownson’s Early Religious Confusion and Mobility
• 3 ‘A Sea of Sectarian Rivalries’: The Second Great Awakening and Religious Conflict
• 4 ‘I am Slave to no Sect’: Brownson’s Defense of Intellectual Freedom and Doubt
• 5 ‘I Wished to Unite Men’: A Vision of Religious Calm in the Midst of an Intellectual Storm
• 6 ‘We must have clothing and a shelter’: The Search for a Religious Home
• 7 ‘We are Ourselves Too Polemical’: Formation of a Rhetorical Pugilist
• 8 ‘A Dangerous and Pestilent Fellow’: Return to Religious Liberalism
• 9 ‘An Uncompromising Catholic and a Thoroughgoing Papist’: End of a Long Journey
• 10 Epilogue
• Index