God and the Atlantic America, Europe, and the Religious Divide

by Howard, Thomas Albert

• ISBN13: 9780199565511
• ISBN10: 0199565511
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-03-15
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the United States and Western Europe's paths to modernity have diverged sharply with respect to religion. In short, Americans have maintained much friendlier ties with traditional forms of religion than their European counterparts. What explains this transatlantic religious divide? Accessing the topic though nineteenth and early twentieth-century European commentary on the United States, Thomas Albert Howard argues that an 'Atlantic gap' in religious matters has deep and complex historical roots, and enduringly informs some strands of European disapprobation of the United States. While exploring in the first chapters 'Old World' disquiet toward the young republic's religious dynamics, the book turns in the final chapters and focuses on more constructive European assessments of the United States. Acknowledging the importance of Alexis de Tocqueville for the topic, Howard argues that a widespread overreliance on Tocqueville as interpreter of America has had a tendency to overshadow other noteworthy European voices. Two underappreciated figures here receive due attention: the Protestant Swiss-German church historian, Philip Schaff, and the French Catholic philosopher, Jacques Maritain. While the transatlantic religious divide has received commentary from journalists and sociologists in recent decades, this is the first major work of cultural and intellectual history devoted to the subject.

Author Biography

Thomas Albert Howard is Professor of History and Director of the Jerusalem & Athens Forum at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts. He is the author of Religion and the Rise of Historicism and Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University, winner of the Lilly Fellows Program Book Award for 2007. He is also the editor of The Future of Christian Learning: An Evangelical and Catholic Dialogue by Mark Noll and James Turner.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
The Presence of the Past	p. 1
Beyond Tocqueville	p. 4
Right, Left, and Master Narratives	p. 10
The Historian and the Philosopher: Philip Schaff and Jacques Maritain	p. 24
The Traditionalist Critique: A "Ranting and Raving Tumult"	p. 28
Introduction	p. 28
Sophisticates Abroad: The Anglican Visitation to American Democracy	p. 32
A Land without "Spirit": German Thought, Religion and America	p. 45
"Indifferentism" and "Americanism": Embattled Catholicism and the American Experiment	p. 67
The Secularist Critique: "A Certain Backwardness of Thought"	p. 85
Introduction	p. 85
America and Early French Social Thought: From Condorcet to Comte	p. 89
Hegel, Marx, Religion, and America	p. 103
The Spirit of 1848: Republican Anticlericalism and America	p. 117
The "Secularization" Ethos and the Spirit of European History	p. 129
Philip Schaff: Herr Doktor Professor in the American Frontier	p. 136
Introduction	p. 136
Young Man Schaff and America's "Deplorable Confusion"	p. 139
A Changing Outlook	p. 143
Schaff's America	p. 146
Jacques Maritain: A French Thomist and the New World	p. 159
Introduction	p. 159
America, the French Prism, and the Young Maritain	p. 160
Maritain, Modernity, and a New Humanism	p. 165
Novus Ordo Sedorum and the Angelic Doctor	p. 174
Conclusion: The Double Helix and the Dialectic	p. 193
Notes	p. 207
Index	p. 247
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