The University of Chicago Troping Protestant Desire: Patterns of Time and Space in Nineteenth-Century American Religious Histor
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO TROPING PROTESTANT DESIRE: PATTERNS OF TIME AND SPACE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN RELIGIOUS HISTORY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVINITY SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY BY ALISON TYNER DAVIS CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JUNE 2018 2018 Alison Tyner Davis All Rights Reserved. ii For Will and Robbie James iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 1 INTRODUCTION 1 2 RELIGION IN VIEW OF THE VALLEY 32 2.2 A General Notice of Religion in the United States 2.3 Episode I: A View of the Valley of the Mississippi 2.4 Episode II: Native Cultures and the Fragmenting of Narrative Time 2.5 Episode III: “Carrying Religion into the Vast Plains of the West” 2.6 Conclusion: Religion in the Mississippi Valley 3 LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS FOR A PROTESTANT AMERICA 74 3.2 Mapping Protestant Dominance 3.3 Episode I: Journeys Toward “The Mystic Center” 3.4 Episode II: Converting Native Temporalities and Space 3.5 Episode III: How the “Wilderness Became a Fruit Field” 3.6 Conclusion 4 PLANTING CHRISTIANITY IN THE “AMERICAN SOIL” 115 4.2 Schaff’s “Living Organism” of Church History 4.3 Episode I: Planting Catholicism in America 4.4 Episode II: Planting Protestant Christianity: Slow Growth in Congenial Soil 4.5 Episode III: The World’s Parliament of Religion 4.6 Conclusion: Evolution and Teleology 5 CONCLUSION: TIME AND SPACE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA 156 BIBLIOGRAPHY iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project began in a two-quarter seminar sequence with Catherine A. Brekus: the first course, in Winter 2014, was an ambitious foray into “The American Religious Historical Canon”; the second part explored more recent scholarly efforts toward “Revising the Canon.” It was in this class that I first learned about Robert Baird, Daniel Dorchester, and L.W. Bacon. That same year, in a course sequence with Richard A. Rosengarten, we studied a selection of American novels in reverse chronology: beginning with Phillip Roth’s The Human Stain and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, we traced our way back through an assembled literary canon to “the beginning”—that is, to The United States Constitution. Together, these three courses on American religion and literature ignited my first attempt to write and assemble a project; they propelled me to explore—in much greater detail than I could have imagined then—the repetition of visual patterns, national spaces, and temporal rhythms across a collected canon of historical texts. I am deeply grateful to Professor Brekus and Professor Rosengarten: for their inspiration, for their examples as scholars, writers, and teachers. As advisor to this project, Professor Rosengarten deserves a multitude of thanks. In our conversations and in the handwritten remarks he offered on chapter drafts, he seemed to always bring to light the recurrent themes and persistent questions. He was an excellent conversation partner for this project and a gracious mentor through the writing process. To my committee members, W. Clark Gilpin and Curtis J. Evans, I owe a debt of gratitude. Their incisive feedback sharpened the argument, and inspired new approaches to the material. Special thanks to Professor Evans for reading many messy first drafts; his detailed comments in those early stages helped me to shift through material and decide what sections needed to be saved, expanded, cut, or condensed. Thanks also to my colleagues in the Religions in America v Workshop, and to the Religion and Literature writing group; I am grateful for our shared conversations and for the thoughtful feedback you offered as the project unfolded. Thanks to my friends and family, for the countless ways they have supported this work. Thank you for the breakfast meetings, the coffee shop work sessions, the mid-day swim breaks, the afternoon walks, the hikes and picnics and pasta dinners, the game nights, the weekly meals and holiday meals. Thanks to Waew for her steadfast care. Thanks to my dad for the music; thanks to my mom for her stories. And to Will and Robbie James: let’s color big and high. vi Introduction: Measuring Time, Negotiating Space, and the Interpretation of Nineteenth-Century American Religious History One always risks becoming tedious in talking about books that are no longer much read. R. Lawrence Moore Religious Outsiders and the Making of America (1986) In 1986, Martin E. Marty published an article in Social Research entitled “The American Religious History Canon.”1 Based on a survey of twenty-five scholars of American religion, the article presented sixteen books judged to have “had a determining influence on the field of American religion.”2 At the top of the list was Sydney E. Ahlstrom’s “magisterial” A Religious History of the American People.3 Marty described the book as “the most impressive summation of the canon ever achieved,” and suggested that, especially for historians “beyond the discipline” of American religion, Ahlstrom’s volume served as a valuable reference guide: “It was his achievement to show how tentacular, encroaching, and suffusive religion has been, and still is, in a putatively secular culture.”4 However, because “specialists deal more with technical monographs than with syntheses,” Marty claimed, “books of this synoptic sort have limited impact on the discipline [of American religious history].” As the remaining fifteen books on 1 Marty, Martin E. "The American Religious History Canon." Social Research 53, no. 3 (1986): 513-28, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40970429. 2 Marty, “The American Religious History Canon,” 514. 3 Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972). “Magisterial” is a common descriptor, see for example: Thomas A. Tweed. Retelling U.S. Religious History. (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997), 13; Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), xvii. Heath W. Carter; Labor and the Politics of the Church. Labor 1 May 2014; 11 (2): 13– 16, 13. 4 “The American Religious History Canon,” 515. 1 Marty’s list illustrate, after Ahlstrom, the discipline moved toward producing “technical monographs” like George Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism 1870-1925, Albert Raboteau’s Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South, and Jay Dolan’s Catholic Revivalism: The American Experience 1830-1900.5 Significantly, R. Lawrence Moore also published his influential book, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans, in 1986. His collection of essays aimed to “shake up the denominational hierarchy that governs the way in which American religious history generally gets told.”6 To this end, Moore traced a canon of a different sort: rather than beginning with Ahlstrom, his survey concluded with Ahlstrom and contemporaries like Marty and Catharine Albanese. Until at least the 1960s, Moore argued, the discipline had long been shaped by a “historiography of desire”: governed by providential narratives and bias toward New England Protestantism, nineteenth- and twentieth-century historical writing was fundamentally motivated by the desire to preserve an “American national character” that was pervasive enough to construct unity out of diversity and consensus amidst religious conflict. According to Moore, this historiographical fixation on consensus began with Robert Baird’s Religion in America (1844) and roughly ended with Sidney Mead’s The Lively Experiment (1963).7 Ahlstrom, Marty, 5 Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture. (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1980, 2006.); Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South. (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1978, 2004.); Dolan, Jay P. Catholic Revivalism: The American Experience, 1830-1900. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978). 6 Moore, R. Laurence. Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 7 Baird, Robert. Religion in the United States of America, Or, An Account of the Origin, Progress, Relations to the State, and Present Condition of the Evangelical Churches in the United States: With Notices of Unevangelical Denomination. (Glasgow: Blackie and Son, 1844); Mead, Sidney Earl. The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America. (New York: Harper & Row, 1963); The Nation with the Soul of a Church. (New York: Harper & Row, 1975); The Old Religion in the Brave New World: Reflections On the Relation between Christendom and the Republic. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). 2 Albanese, and Gaustad offered a corrective to this trend, Moore argued, by “calling attention to the huge areas of American religious experience, especially in the nineteenth century, that have received not nearly sufficient attention—black churches, immigrant churches, and the uncountable number of independent churches.”8 Historiographical critiques like Moore’s have continued to the present: they have traced the remarkable persistence of Baird’s consensus narrative and strategically intervened to address the looming gaps left by these early narratives. Jon Butler’s Awash in a Sea of Faith (1990), for instance, challenged the “Puritan interpretation of America’s religious origins” by “reconstructing a more complex religious past.”9 Butler cited Baird, along with Stephen Colwell, author of The Position of Christianity in the United States (1853), as peddlers of a “myth of the American Christian past, one of the most powerful myths to inform the history of both American religion and American society.”10 In 1992, the second edition to Catherine Albanese’s America: Religions and Religion was released (the first edition was published in 1981); in the preface, Albanese leveraged what was, by now, a familiar critique: When we look at America’s history books—and more to the point here, America’s religious history books—we find that they generally tell one major story, incorporating the separate stories of many peoples into a single storyline arranged chronologically. Telling one story is possible only at a considerable cost—that of losing touch with the richness and texture of American pluralism.11 In like manner, Thomas A.