Thursday, March 02, 2006
(11:15 AM) | Old - Doug Johnson:
American Religous History (pt. 2): (almost) All Ahlstrom
orWhy Hasn't the Enlightenment Secularized the U.S. to the Extent It Has Europe and Canada?
First, can I just say how consistently charmed I am by the pictures at Long Sunday. Who is responsible for those?
Also, s0metim3s has posted at LS regarding an upcoming symposium there on Tronti and "The Strategy of Refusal" (refusal to work). I'm interested given my post last week, ending with the quote from Jo's paper on work as our new religion.
To business: Sydney Ahlstrom's massive A Religious History of the American People (RHAP) is without question one of the very most important and engaging pieces of general American history ever written, and this even if the scope of its reach sometimes requires it to devolve ever so temporarily into something approaching a dime store encyclopedia. Chapters two through sixty-three are subdivided into nine parts. Conceptually, the first third of the book takes the reader through 'the revolutionary era' (ch. 23). Part I 'European Prologue' (ch. 2-7)is a breath of fresh air insofar as it doesn't begin with Plymouth and Jamestown, but rather takes seriously not only the impact of the reformation on American history, but also the wider European religio-political climate and its imperial religious projects from Cape Horn to Canada. Unfortunately, if understandably, Ahlstrom's focus after chapter seven narrows to U.S. history only.
Parts II and III, 'The Protestant Empire Founded' (ch. 8-16) and 'The Century of Awakening and Revolution' (17-23), witness the deployment of the Puritan thesis, the backbone of RHAP's structure, a thesis first developed in Perry Milller's application of Weber and now consistently applied across four centuries of American religious history by Ahlstrom. I will spare the details, but insist that the history of anti-Puritanism in the U.S. is almost always so readily subsumed into the dominant ethos that everyone should take some time at some point to seriously investigate Puritanism's salient points. There is no better place to begin than these chapters in Ahlstrom. The crown jewel of Parts II and III, indeed the very best chapter in the entire book in my estimation is ch. 22, 'Provincial America and the Coming of the Enlightenment.' Above all else, Ahlstrom's explanation of why the coming of the Enlightenment was and has remained less secularizing in the U.S. than elsewhere turns on his account of how early American Calvinists, especially especially Jonathon Edwards, drank deeply at Enlightenment wells, took up the insights of the less anti-religious Scottish Enlightenment, and incorporated Locke, Newton, and others into a dazzling theological system that could withstand a hell of a lot with respect to secularization. And the contributions of Edwards and others were highly influential even on those figures of the American Enlightenment deeply sympathetic to more atheistic or deistic European versions. I'll simply quote the final paragraph almost in full:
... most of the men who were to become the nation's founding fathers were led
into essentially enlightened modes of understanding history, government, law,
God, man, and destiny. ... [F]rom each of the three main sections of the country would come one man who by international standards represented the classical Enlightenment at its typical best: John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. Each of these men sought to express the new rationalism with complete intellectual integrity. Each of them tried in a serious way, through a long and active career, to deal coherently with the separate but interrelated problems of man, God, nature, and society. Each of them exemplified in a unique way how the Puritan heritage, an emerging pattern of middle-class democracy, and the fresh influences of the Enlightenment were preparing the American colonies for a common and united destiny.
In the interest of my time and also of not going over long like last week, I'll have to risk a to be continued for pt. 2 'all ahlstrom'.
