Culture and Redemption

Religion, the Secular, and American Literature

Tracy Fessenden

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781400837304
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion, Politik & Staat

Many Americans wish to believe that the United States, founded in religious tolerance, has gradually and naturally established a secular public sphere that is equally tolerant of all religions--or none. Culture and Redemption suggests otherwise. Tracy Fessenden contends that the uneven separation of church and state in America, far from safeguarding an arena for democratic flourishing, has functioned instead to promote particular forms of religious possibility while containing, suppressing, or excluding others. At a moment when questions about the appropriate role of religion in public life have become trenchant as never before, Culture and Redemption radically challenges conventional depictions--celebratory or damning--of America's "secular" public sphere.
Examining American legal cases, children's books, sermons, and polemics together with popular and classic works of literature from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, Culture and Redemption shows how the vaunted secularization of American culture proceeds not as an inevitable by-product of modernity, but instead through concerted attempts to render dominant forms of Protestant identity continuous with democratic, civil identity. Fessenden shows this process to be thoroughly implicated, moreover, in practices of often-violent exclusion that go to the making of national culture: Indian removals, forced acculturations of religious and other minorities, internal and external colonizations, and exacting constructions of sex and gender. Her new readings of Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Stowe, Twain, Gilman, Fitzgerald, and others who address themselves to these dynamics in intricate and often unexpected ways advance a major reinterpretation of American writing.

PART ONE

Protestantism and the
Social Space of Reading

Chapter One

LEGIBLE DOMINION:
PURITANISM’S NEW WORLD NARRATIVE

Radical Protestants demanded that the sacred be
brought into everyday life, into history itself; and to do
so they abolished the separation of holy from secular
days, insisting that the divine leave its old haunts—
churches and pilgrimage sites—to become a part of the
workplace, the household, to be identified with the history
of peoples (at first reforming sects, later with
whole nations) chosen by God to carry out his divine
purpose in secular time and space. At its most extreme
the goal was nothing short of the deinstitutionalization
of religion and its internalization in the hearts and
minds of all believers. . . . In the end, the Reformation
contributed not to the sacralization of the world, but
to its secularization.
—John Gillis, Commemorations:
The Politics of National Identity

WHEN CRISTÓBAL COLÓN arrived on the shores of the Bahamas in 1492, he staked his claim to their possession in a flourish of Catholic theatricality, calling members of his expedition duly to witness his consecration of the land “in the name of our most illustrious Monarch, with public proclamation and with unfurled banners.”¹ Some fourteen decades later, the English Puritans who arrived in the New World territories they seized as their refuge from popish and prelatical worldliness described their taking of the land as initiated simply, as John Winthrop put it in his History of New England from 1630 to 1640, “by building an house there.”² John Cotton elaborated the Puritan theory of ownership: “in a vacant Soyle, hee that taketh possession of it, and bestoweth culture and husbandry upon it, his Right it is.”³

The resonantly anticeremonial quality of what Patricia Seed names the Puritans’ “ceremonies of possession” suggests how deeply their material and spiritual claims to their New Jerusalem were grounded in the practice of everyday life. When John Eliot enumerated the means by which the Puritan attained the “ancient and excellent character of a true Christian”—by keeping not only the Sabbath but the “so many Sabbaths more” devoted to Bible reading, to lectures, to “family-duties” and “daily devotions in our closets,” indeed to all “civill callings” and “employment[s]” (“we buy and sell, and toil; yea we eat and drink, with some eye both to the command and honour of God in all”)—he concluded that those so occupied were left not “an inch of time to be carnal; it is all engrossed for heaven”: “If thou art a believer, thou art no stranger to heaven while thou livest, and when thou diest, heaven will be no strange place to thee; no, thou hast been there a thousand times before.”⁴

The creation of a world where eternal life is found in earthly “employment” and the Sabbath undifferentiated from the days of the week that make “so many Sabbaths more” required not only that the difference of the religious per se be dissolved in the conduct of day-to-day life, but also that religious difference itself be constituted as a threat to that life, since manifestly different forms of religious practice and observance point to fissures between the spiritual and worldly realms the Puritans sought to fuse and make one. William Bradford answered the objection of returning colonists that there “was diversitie about Religion”: “We know no such matter, for here was never any controversie or opposition, either publicke or private, (to our knowledg,) since we came.”⁵ “Diversitie about Religion” remained invisible as long as its representatives, as Edward Johnson put it in his Wonder-Working Providence, “fled into holes and corners”: “Familists, Seekers, Antinomians and Anabaptists . . . cry out like cowards, If you will let me alone, and I will let you alone, but assuredly the Lord Christ hath said, He that is not with us, is against us; there is no room in his Army for toleratorists.”⁶ While the “gathered church” of the first generations of Puritans limited its membership to the few who could give an acceptable verbal relation of grace, their civil persecutions of spiritual renegades and outsiders—the hanging of Quakers or the maiming of blasphemers, the exile of dissidents or the proscribing of Catholics, all acts that took place against a backdrop of genocidal violence against Indians—maintained the insularity of the New England Way while also making it coextensive with the civil community.⁷ As Philip Fisher suggests, “where there are two [or more] systems of belief there are ‘religions,’ but where there is only one there is only how things are and must be. Social life, when uniform, creates a transparency that we call familiarity, and it is this feeling of familiarity that lets us move from place to place without much effort.”⁸

While no one would mistake the relentlessly enforced precariousness of Puritan spiritual life for “effortlessness,” the very vigor of the Puritan effort to render heaven and earth commensurable gave rise by the nineteenth century to what many accounts of America’s religious development depict as a form of national life in which the religious and the civil are barely distinguishable. Only in America, as Richard Rapson puts it, has “religion ever been so exclusively addressed to this world, so accessible, so awe-uninspiring, so common-sensical, so unmysterious, so simple, so sympathetic to everyday human needs.”⁹ According to what would take shape as a “consensus narrative” of U.S. religious history, the emergence of this unremarkable, distinctively American religion proceeded through successive acts of democratic inclusion, whereby the failed experiment of the Puritan gathered church eventually yielded a tolerant form of secularized Protestantism that nevertheless remained synonymous with the national community.¹⁰ In its mid-nineteenth-century versions—Robert Baird’s Religion in America, for example—the consensus narrative portrays an American population united by a common Protestant faith into a single, freedom-loving people, even as nine in ten African Americans were then in bonds, Native Americans were being forcibly driven from their lands, white congregations in the South had begun to secede from their national communions in defense of slavery, and native-born Protestants in northeastern cities rioted in the streets against the Catholic immigrants who would soon outnumber them. The acts of aggression, intolerance, and triumphalism that worked to secure the effect of Protestant consensus for American religious historiography, meanwhile, continued to disappear into the benign vision of the religiously accommodating culture they produced: in its post–World War II versions, the story of America’s religious development—beginning, again, with the Puritans—typically credits American’s vaunted Protestant heritage with fostering a culture of democracy and religious tolerance unequalled by any nation on earth.¹¹

How has New England Puritanism come to stand at the origin point of this quintessentially American narrative of religious tolerance and accommodation? Not, I suggest, for shielding its own violent exclusions—no shortage of bloodshed in Puritan writings—but rather for subsuming these acts of violence under the transcendent, redemptive authority of the Christian Word.¹² Associating both literacy and their removal from an ensoiling Europe with freedom from prelatical spiritual tyranny and monarchical political tyranny, American Puritans sought to project themselves decisively beyond the dividing line they drew between Catholic “matter” and Protestant “spirit,” between a moribund, wandering past and a dynamic, providential history, between the dangerous attractions of sensuous ritual and the disembodying powers of the Word.¹³ The redemptive power they accorded to literacy and to what the Puritan Richard Baxter called “Self-Examination,” or “the serious and diligent trying of a man’s heart . . . by the rule of scripture” resulted, according to Andrew Delbanco, in habits of “obsessive self-chronicling” that “guaranteed for [the Puritans] a unique afterlife in American culture.”¹⁴ American history “begins” with Puritans insofar as this history is rendered as progress away from hierarchy, ritual, and corruption, and as the gradual triumph of democracy, literacy, and plainspoken truth. Puritans are foundational to this history because this is the history their “obsessive self-chronicling” defines.¹⁵

It is not simply that New England’s native peoples (to take the paradigmatic case) were excluded from a progressive narrative of history they could not easily be brought into. Rather, the providential narrative of history itself both authorizes and obscures the acts of violence by which cultures in competition with the Puritans’ own were marginalized or destroyed. “The Lord takes care to make us spiritual in our Imployments,” wrote Joshua Moody in Souldiery Spiritualized, or the Christian Souldier Orderly, and Strenuously Engaged in the Spiritual Warre, “by spiritualizing all our Imployments. Yea, all our Relations and Conditions, as well as our Imployments, are . . . improved to our Hands by the Spirit of God in his Word [so] that they may . . . further us in those matters that are of most solemn and momentous, because of Eternal concernment.”¹⁶ “Spiritualizing” conflictingly suggests both intensification and erasure: to spiritualize material “Imployments” is both to elevate and to demote their importance, to make them matters of “Eternal concernment” and at the same time immaterial, neither here nor there. This is the peculiarly Protestant ethos Weber would call this-worldly asceticism, a “combination of vertues,” John Cotton wrote, “strangely mixed in every lively holy Christian, And that is, Diligence in worldly businesses, and yet deadnesse to the world.” The Puritan could “bestir himself for profit” and yet “bee a man dead-hearted to the world”; he could seize Indian lands and defend them by violence, “yet his heart is not set on these things, he can tell what to doe with his estate when he hath got it.”¹⁷

Here I seek to follow this “strangely mixed” quality of Puritan reflection by refusing the easy separation implied in the calls of literary and religious historians alike to attend anew to the complexity of Puritan narrative rather than to the brute facts of Puritan violence,¹⁸ or, conversely, to shift focus (at least occasionally) from the Puritans’ “sincere desire to establish Christian colonies” to their “stealing of Indian land, and their habit of displacing and murdering these Indians whenever it was convenient.”¹⁹ The Puritans’ violence against religious and racial outsiders, I argue, was intricately and inseparably linked with their own dealings with the Word, including their ardent promotion of literacy as a tool for the conquest of spiritual enemies as well as their development of genres designed to further projects of Protestant consolidation and expansion.²⁰ My own aim in starting with Puritans is not to privilege as definitively American the New England culture that, beginning with the Puritans, sought to make American identity continuous with Anglo-Protestant identity, but rather to shed light on the ways New England Protestantism elicited assent to its own claims to historical and national primacy by framing the progress of both history and the nation in Protestant terms.²¹

LANGUAGE AND POSSESSION

Where other legal systems—French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch—brought from Europe to the New World required authorized written documents to establish title to new lands, only English law made the construction of fixed dwellings and the cultivation of soil the legal mark of ownership.²² But this right of ownership as constituted in English law was itself a function of literacy and of the spread of print culture more broadly, since it emerged from the linkage between the absolute value of private property and the absolute possession of one’s own conscience, a linkage that developed from the Protestant Reformers’ insistence that the relationship between God and the individual soul was not to be mediated by ecclesiastical authorities but secured sola scriptura, via the agency of the Word. This construction of Protestant inwardness, cultivated in Bible reading and private devotion, fitted Protestant men for the exercise of personal responsibility and contractual obligations that a society based on property ownership required.²³

Thus Cotton Mather linked the absence of private property among Indians to what he saw as their failures of language: “our shiftless Indians were never so much as Owners of a Knife, till we came upon them; their Name for an English-man was a Knife-man.”²⁴ Proper language use constituted what Samuel Purchas aptly called the “litteral advantage” that set English Protestants over those to whose worlds they laid claim by building houses and planting crops: “God hath added herein a further grace, that as Men . . . exceed beasts, so hereby one man may excell another; and amongst Men, some are accounted Civill, and more both Sociable and Religious, by the Use of letters and Writing, which others wanting are esteemed Brutish, Savage, Barbarous.”²⁵

To establish plantations, to signal possession by building and planting, was also for English colonists to sow the Word in the wilds of the Indian world. The goal of the Plymouth plantation, according to Robert Cushman, h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Protestantism and the Social Space of Reading
• Part Two: Secular Fictions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index