God In America, Part One: An Exercise in the Evangelical Whig View of Early American Religious History

 By John Fea

Cross-posted at The Way of Improvement Leads Home

I just got done watching Part 1 of the PBS series "God in America." I know I am behind (Part 2 aired tonight), but such is the life of a blogger, professor, and a new department chair.

The series begins with the Franciscan attempts to convert the Pueblo Indians to Christianity in the 17th century.  This, of course, is a sad chapter in American history.  The Spanish friars were militant.  Their evangelistic zeal led to the destruction of Pueblo sacred sites and all sorts of brutality.  The high point of this story is the Pueblo revolt of 1680, the Indian rebellion that put an end to the Spanish presence in the west and proved that Christianity would not come to America unchanged.

This is a nice way to begin, but it has absolutely no connection to the rest of Part One's narrative.  One gets the impression that this was just tacked on to the beginning of the program because SOMETHING needed to be said about native Americans.  The story line of the native Americans, and the Spanish for that matter, are quickly dropped in favor of what I call in the title of this post the "evangelical Whig view" of American history.  This script could have been written by George Bancroft.

And where is slave religion?  (Let's hope it is discussed later in the series).

The Puritans are next. Steven Prothero of Boston University establishes himself as our guide through this history, but we also hear from a star-studded lineup of historians that include Michael Winship, Frank Lambert, Mary Beth Norton, Stephen Marini

Much time is spent on Anne Hutchinson. Too much time.  Prothero is very good at showing the Protestant individualism of the Puritans and how Hutchinson, in some ways, seemed more Protestant than the Puritans.  Hutchinson is clearly the star.  There is more time spent on her story than on the Puritans who removed her from the colony.  Was the Hutchinson trial really the most important moment in 17th century New England history? Would the people living in Puritan New England have seen it this way?  Absolutely not. The Halfway Covenant, King Philips War, the Salem Witch Trials, and a host of other events would have been more important to the Puritan "city on a hill," but these events do not fit easily into the Whig narrative.

The portrayal of the Hutchinson trial is well-acted and the trial transcript is used as the script.  Winship claims that during this trial Hutchinson "rips him (John Winthrop) to shreds."  Norton celebrates the rebellious spirit of Hutchinson.  Prothero concludes that Hutchinson is the future of America--she represents liberty of conscience and religious freedom.

The documentary then jumps to George Whitefield. Marini stresses the individualism of evangelical religion. (By the way, I would love to take a class with Marini--so much passion and energy!)  Harry Stout mentions Whitefield's appeal to the emotions and the imagination.  Lambert connects Whitefield's evangelical, individualistic Protestantism to that of Hutchinson.  A clear intellectual and spiritual genealogy is developing here.

The discussion of the First Great Awakening does a great job of explaining evangelicalism as a real and powerful religious movement that impacted people's lives.  The documentary uses a host of quotes from the diaries of Whitefield converts to make this point.  Very well done.

But overall the treatment of the Great Awakening is blatantly Whig. One is left with the impression that the Great Awakening was more of a political movement than it was a religious movement. Stout talks about the way Whitefield's evangelicalism challenged "the old aristocratic order" and even suggests that the Great Awakening led to the popular idea that "we are the people."  Then Daniel Driesbach talks about the way that the Great Awakening brought the colonies together.  One clearly gets the impression that these historians are setting us up for the American Revolution.  I tell my students that the Great Awakening created a transatlantic religious network that made the colonies more British and Protestant.  "God in America" would prefer to see it as the seedbed of individual liberty, revolution, and American identity.

And then, in the last three minutes of Part One, we get the triumph of the evangelical Whig narrative or, what Jon Butler has called "Born Again History."

The narrator states that people began to insist that it was their right to worship in the church of their choice.  Evangelical religion is said to have provided the American Revolution with a sense of "moral" urgency. Prothero says that following the First Great Awakening, the Revolution was "inevitable" and "perfectly logical."

In the end, the story of "God in America"--at least early America-- is best told by following a direct line between Hutchinson and Whitefield, culminating in the American Revolution.  At times I thought I was sitting in a lecture at Glenn Beck University.

The Tea-Partying of American Religion

by Steven P. Miller

Thomas Frank made easy sport today of a recent piece by Glenn Harlan Reynolds (the ur-blogger of popular conservatism) in which Reynolds touted the Tea Party movement as “America’s Third Great Awakening.” Upon reading the article in question, I realized that Reynolds did indeed have Whitefield, Finney, et al, in mind when referring to those earlier awakenings, which he does concede “were religious in nature.” Now, he writes, “it’s different. It’s not America’s churches and seminaries that are in trouble: It’s America’s politicians and parties.”

Without giving Reynolds the dignity of too much attention, he does point to the creative means by which Americans will “whig” just about anything—in this case, rolling the conventional narrative of American Protestantism into a tale of continuous liberty tree watering. Moreover, he pulled off an interesting historigraphical reversal. Normally, it’s the proverbial liberal academy that secularizes religious history. From camp meetings to town hall screaming, the Lord works in mysterious ways . . .

Blogging Bonanza

Paul Harvey

Our contributing editor Phillip Luke Sinitiere has been going on a blogging bonanza, with his new course blog in American religious history "One Nation, Many Faiths," part III of his interview with historian Thomas Kidd about Kidd's work on the Great Awakening, and a year-long retrospective interview with Ed Blum about W. E. B. DuBois, American Prophet, which also features a roundup of interviews, revews, etc. about the book. Thanks to Phil for this blogging feast.

The Way of Improvement Leads to a Website and Blog

Paul Harvey

Our contributing editor John Fea has set up a blog and website for his book The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Phillip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America. Here's the description of the book from the website:

The Way of Improvement Leads Home traces the short but fascinating life of Philip Vickers Fithian, one of the most prolific diarists in early America. Born to Presbyterian grain-growers in rural New Jersey, he was never quite satisfied with the agricultural life he seemed destined to inherit. Fithian longed for something more—to improve himself in a revolutionary world that was making upward mobility possible. While Fithian is best known for the diary that he wrote in 1773-74 while working as a tutor at Nomini Hall, the Virginia plantation of Robert Carter, this first full biography moves beyond his experience in the Old Dominion to examine his inner life, his experience in the early American backcountry, his love affair with Elizabeth Beatty, and his role as a Revolutionary War chaplain.

From the villages of New Jersey, Fithian was able to participate indirectly in the eighteenth-century republic of letters—a transatlantic intellectual community sustained through sociability, print, and the pursuit of mutual improvement. The republic of letters was above all else a rational republic, with little tolerance for those unable to rid themselves of parochial passions. Participation required a commitment to self-improvement that demanded a belief in the Enlightenment values of human potential and social progress. Although Fithian was deeply committed to these values, he constantly struggled to reconcile his quest for a cosmopolitan life with his love of home. As John Fea argues, it was the people, the religious culture, and the very landscape of his "native sod" that continued to hold Fithian's affections and enabled him to live a life worthy of a man of letters.

Here is some more information on John's article in the Journal of American History a few years back, which previewed the book:

In conjunction with an article I published about Fithian in 2003, the Journal of American History put hundreds of pages of Fithian's writings on-line. The site, which is part of the journal's "Teaching the JAH" feature, includes the article and study questions suitable for the high school and undergraduate classroom. I will try to get a link to these writings on the book website soon.

And here's a preview of John's thoughts on the question on the relationship of the Great Awakening to the American Revolution, as well as the question of the "evangelical synthesis" in American history:

Some of my thoughts here, which I hope to develop a bit more later at "Religion and American History," deal with the idea, popular among many historians, that the First Great Awakening, the great evangelical religious revival of the 1740s, had something to do with the coming of the American Revolution. I do not address this question directly in The Way of Improvement Leads Home, but I do imply that the enthusiasm and revival evangelicalism of the Great Awakening had little effect on the way Presbyterians such as Philip Vickers Fithian understood the Revolution. In fact, I suggest in the book that it was actually the reaction against the Great Awakening that had the most profound influence on the Presbyterian response to the American Revolution. (And this Presbyterian response was significant. Remember that George III called the American Revolution a "Presbyterian rebellion.").

Born Again History?

JOHN FEA

Paul's last post on Clifton's book and John Turner's comment about Jon Butler and the "evangelical synthesis" really struck a chord with me since I have been thinking about this historiographical trend for the past several months in light of some of my current work in early America. I had planned to write a series of posts on this in the next few weeks, but I think the time is right to jump in at this juncture.

Back in 1994 Butler gave a paper at the OAH entitled "Born Again History?" (I do not think he ever published the piece--at least not in this form or by this title). In his own provocative way Butler argued that the so-called evangelical sythesis has not only come to be the dominant paradigm for understanding American religious history, but has become the dominant paradigm for understanding much of American history as a whole. He notes how evangelicalism is used by historians to explain the coming of the American Revolution, post-war republicanism, antebellum social reform, the family, abolitionism, 19th century women's culture, foreign policy, race and the South, populism, progressivism, the post-Watergate presidency, conservatism, and the list goes on. (All one has to do is read the archives of this blog to see that this is still a predominant approach to understanding the American past). Butler, as many of our readers know, is highly critical of this approach and has offered what I think is a sometimes helpful corrective to the evangelical synthesis.

In the time frame that I know best--the period between the First Great Awakening (roughly 1740) and the American Revolution (roughly 1789)--this evangelical synthesis dominates the field. Butler argued strongly against the connection between the Great Awakening and the Revolution in Awash in a Sea of Faith and elsewhere, but it almost seems as if historians (and I am talking off the top of my head, correct me if I am wrong) have completely ignored him. (John Murrin's 1983 classic "No Awakening, No Revolution?: More Counterfactual Speculations" is an exception and I could probably think of a few more if I took the time to do so). Over the last decade or so, most of the work in this area continues to embrace a direct connection between the great evangelical Awakening and the Revolution.

I will stop there for now, but I hope to follow up this post with a "part two" that will be more specific on the way the evangelical paradigm has influenced this period. (I will try to name titles). Then, if I find the time, I would like to add a third post on some alternative (and new?) ways of thinking about this period after spending a fruitful spring and early summer in the archives.

Reviving the Great Awakening, Part II

Paul Harvey

Don't miss "Reviving the Great Awakening, Part II," Baldblogger's continuing interviews with Thomas Kidd on his works on the Great Awakening. Here's an excerpt, with links to important follow-up reading material:

BB: One of the points you make early in The Great Awakening is that contemporary accounts of the movement overlook the role of the Holy Spirit in evangelical revivalism. This speaks on the one hand to questions surrounding religious practice (i.e., “manifestations” of the Spirit), while on the other hand it brings a focus to the role of “enchantment” (to use a sociological term) in this history of evangelicalism. You effectively sustain this line of argument throughout the book. What exactly does understanding the role of the Holy Spirit add to our understanding of colonial evangelical revival and religious practice? (Reading between the lines here, are readers right to identify this angle of analysis a silent commentary on your own faith tradition?)

Thomas Kidd: The Great Awakening was shot through with mystical manifestations of the Spirit (trances, dreams, visions, healings, spirit journeys, etc.). Historians have often not known what to make of such episodes, and have only recently begun to look seriously at them as an integral part of evangelical history. Historian Douglas Winiarski has probably done more than anyone to alert us to the teeming presence of the miraculous in early evangelicalism. My sense is that the mysticism of the revivals fed their intensity, subversiveness, and individualistic tendencies. The belief in the Spirit led many common people to believe that they had a more profound experience with God than many of the state-supported, college-educated pastors. I certainly also have personal interest in the ways that experiences in the Spirit tend to fuel a kind of Christian egalitarianism.

UPDATE: Robert Orsi, from a popular Catholicism perspective, addresses this line of thinking and analysis in a 2007 article explaining religious mysteries and human encounters with the transcendent. For further reflections readers might also wish to read Orsi's 2006 interview in Historically Speaking. And of course in this context we should not fail to mention two recent books that help scholars to ponder analysis of the unseen: Orsi's Between Heaven and Earth and Thomas Tweed's Crossing and Dwelling.

American Religious History and Historians at Baldblogger

Paul Harvey

Some months ago, Baldblogger featured a several-part series of interviews and posts on Ed Blum and W. E. B. Du Bois: American Prophet, and more recently reports on Blum's recent lecture at the University of Houston, "The Noose and the Cross: Race, Religion, and the Redemption of Violence in the Works of W. E. B. Du Bois."

Last week, Baldblogger began the first of a three-part interview series with Thomas Kidd, author and editor of recent important works on the Great Awakening. These new books, and the interview, highlight the importance of Kidd's work, and should be must-reads for American religious historians. We'll look forward to the continuation of this series.

Thanks to Baldblogger for his vital contributions to blogging in American religious history!