Culture and Redemption

by Fessenden, Tracy

• ISBN13: 9780691049632
• ISBN10: 0691049637
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-11-06
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

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 Redemptionsuggests 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 Redemptionradically challenges conventional depictions--celebratory and 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 Redemptionshows 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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(12)
PART ONE: Protestantism and the Social Space of Reading	13	(96)
Legible Dominion: Puritanism's New World Narrative	15	(19)
Protestant Expansion, Indian Violence, and Childhood Death: The New England Primer	34	(26)
From Disestablishment to ``Consensus'': The Nineteenth-Century Bible Wars and the Limits of Dissent	60	(24)
Conversion to Democracy: Religion and the American Renaissance	84	(25)
PART TWO: Secular Fictions	109	(104)
From Romanism to Race: Uncle Tom's Cabin	111	(26)
Mark Twain and the Ambivalent Refuge of Unbelief	137	(24)
Secularism, Feminism, Imperialism: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Progress Narrative of U.S. Feminism	161	(20)
F. Scott Fitzgerald's Catholic Closet	181	(32)
Afterword: American Religion and the Future of Dissent	213	(6)
Notes	219	(70)
Bibliography	289	(34)
Index	323