Secularity and the Antebellum American Novel
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FRAGILE BELIEF: SECULARITY AND THE ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN NOVEL by Grant Shreve A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland December, 2016 ABSTRACT Fragile Belief re-evaluates the relationship between secularity, ethnocultural pluralism, and the novel in the US through an excavation of the experience and representation of religious difference during the first half of the nineteenth century. Secularization narratives have predominated historical accounts of the novel, but in the “spiritual hothouse” of the antebellum US neither secularization nor the history of the novel have proceeded along such straight historical lines. My study joins the ongoing interdisciplinary conversation about secularism by distinguishing what I call “American secularity” as a condition engendered by the surfeit of belief in the US rather than by the naturalization of unbelief. Whereas the secularization of Europe was, according to Charles Taylor, driven by the reformation of the Catholic Church and the rise of humanism, “American secularity,” I contend, emerged within the pressurized environment of global religious contact in the US, a result of sectarian proliferation, indigenous spiritual resistance, European immigration, and the importation of Islam and West African religious traditions via the slave trade. The novel, I argue, arose in the wake of disestablishment in the US as a singular genre for mediating global religious difference as well as for interrogating secularism’s imperative to define “religion.” The authors I treat in each of the chapters track the genre’s development alongside the expansion of public Protestantism in the US. Chapter 1 examines the dynamics of religious contact and exchange between Protestantism and Native American religion in Lydia Maria Child’s first novel Hobomok (1824). In chapter 2, I show how the novels of the New England aristocrat and devout Unitarian Catharine Sedgwick tested the outer limits of liberal ii Protestant tolerance through the sustained and unassimilable presence in her fiction of celibate religious outsiders. Chapter 3 places Herman Melville’s novels Mardi and Moby- Dick in the context of the Mormon crisis of the 1840s. Finally, chapter 4 concludes outside the borders of the nation by recovering the political theology of black emigration movements in Martin Delany’s Blake; or, the Huts of America, abolishing plural religious expression and rejecting the foundational assumptions governing public Protestantisn in the US. Advisors: Eric Sundquist, Jared Hickman iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I extend my sincere thanks to Eric Sundquist for being a model of intellectual responsibility, for having a faith in my abilities to do this work, and for giving me the opportunities to prove them. His has been a steady and guiding hand throughout. Jared Hickman deserves more praise than I can offer here for his tireless attention to my writing and his willingness to follow me along even the most esoteric lines of thought. Our conversations have enlarged the scope of what I thought it was possible to do in this discipline, and I have often left his office, to quote Hannah Adams, “so strongly excited, that extreme feeling obliged me to lay aside my employment.” Without the support of the Women and Gender Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University in 2014, I would not have been able to visit the Catharine Maria Sedgwick papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society, which proved essential to the development of my second chapter. I wish to thank my parents, Terry and Donna Shreve, for their encouragement of everything I’ve pursued, big and small. I’ve never for a moment doubted their unconditional support and am all too aware how fortunate I am to have it. I am grateful to my sister Clare, as well, for being a continuous source of comic relief, even when it has come at my expense. Most importantly, Joanie, thanks for sticking with me, for being my best friend and constant companion through all of this, for laying me down when I’ve had no place to fall. And to Caleb: thanks for letting daddy go to work so much. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………….vi Introduction: Secularity and the Rise of the American Novel…………………………….1 Chapter One: Hobomok and the Grounds of American Secularity……………………....58 Chapter Two: Catharine Sedgwick’s Celibacy Plots…………………………………….97 Chapter Three: Melville, Mormons, and Religious Bodies…………………………….145 Chapter Four: The Exodus of Martin Delany…………………………………………..200 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….242 Curriculum Vitae…………………………………………………………………….....270 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Charles Taylor’s mapping of belief positions…………………………………12 vi INTRODUCTION SECULARITY AND THE RISE OF THE AMERICAN NOVEL Between 1789 and 1865, the world’s first secular nation also became one of its most religiously diverse.1 This was not by design. The drafters of the United States Constitution could hardly have anticipated that their decision to isolate civic institutions from religious ones would be a crucial element in the efflorescence of religiosity several decades later. But the separation of church and state at the federal level, besides enshrining a certain conception of religion at the heart of national identity, accelerated disestablishment movements at the state level, and by 1819 every state in the union but Massachusetts had eliminated religious preferences and assessments, creating the conditions for what Jon Butler has called the “antebellum spiritual hothouse.” From 1820 onward, the nation boiled over with genuinely novel religious movements (Mormonism, Spiritualism, and Christian Restorationism), utopian communities (the Oneida Community, Brook Farm, and revived Shaker communities), innumerable upstart prophets, and dozens of immigrant churches, not to mention Native American prophetic movements and independent African American churches and religious communities in both the North and the South.2 For a country without an official ecclesiastical center, the rapid cross-pollination and pluralization of US religion triggered vital confrontations with how “true” religion 1 See Stark and Finke, 22-108. 2 For more on the religious diversity of the period, see Butler, 225-256; and Hatch, 17-48. For an account of slave religion in the southern US, see Raboteau, Slave Religion, 211-88. For accounts of the black church, see Lincoln and Mamiya, The Black Church; Du Bois, Negro Church; Raboteau, Fire, 79-116; and Newman, Freedom’s Prophet. On Native American resistance movements, see Dowd and J. Martin. 1 ought to be distinguished from “false” religion and with the forms public religion could take in a disestablished state. These were encounters that occurred in the routine interactions between citizens and neighbors as well as in the highest echelons of state power. Out of the theological, political, and epistemological anxieties these new conditions engendered emerged what John Modern has termed the “evangelical public sphere,” a civic space shaped and dominated by a generic and unabashedly public form of Protestant Christianity (“Confused Parchments”). Public Protestantism was born from the union of several evangelical denominations (mostly consisting of Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists) and supported by a diffuse network of tract societies, voluntary associations, and revivals, which were responsible for disseminating a set of behavioral and theological norms that became virtually synonymous in the early republic with religion as such.3 As recent theorists of secularism have observed, the success of Protestant consolidation in the US was essential to the career of American-style secularism, for public Protestantism provided that nascent ideology—whose raison d’etre is to distinguish the religious from the non-religious—with a conception of religion around which to organize and differentiate itself.4 But the interdependence of American secularism and public Protestantism was far from an inevitability, for germinating within the tumult of the Second Great Awakening were the stirrings of other meta-religious ideologies alternative to the Protestant-inflected liberal state. Besides being a spiritual hothouse, therefore, the antebellum era was also an 3 On the idea of the “moral establishment,” see Sehat, 51-72. For broad discussions of the characteristic features of public Protestantism, see Albanese, American Religion, 276-83; and Hutchison, 60-65. And on the American theology underlying the “Evangelical Republican synthesis,” see Noll, 161-208. 4 For a definition of “American-style secularism” see McClay. For discussions of the central purpose of secularism, see Mahmood, Religious Difference, 1-30 and Hurd, 1-21. 2 incubator for secularism(s). The antebellum novel is a key archive of these unrealized vectors, for it arose in tandem with public Protestantism as the definitive genre for not only narrating the nation but also mediating religious diversity in the wake of disestablishment.5 Considering the novel’s rise in relation to that of public Protestantism is essential for understanding the singular and contingent careers of secularization and secularism in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century. Ever since Georg Lukács wrote that “the novel is the epic in a world abandoned by God,” histories of the novel have been secularization stories, making the novel into the indisputable literary genre of a secular age (88). For Lukács, the novel emblematized