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  • Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature
  • Anne C. Rose
Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature. By Tracy Fessenden. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. x + 337 pp. $35.00.

The stated purpose of Culture and Redemption is to make religion a standard category of analysis in the study of American literature, but the book defines religion so narrowly that it leaves an impression of the author’s suspicion of religious activity and her inclination to speak quickly and be done with it. Tracy Fessenden argues that although literary scholars gladly embrace a “secularization narrative” that reduces religion to a historical artifact, pious instincts persist today in covert as well as overt forms (3). Alongside evangelical celebrations of Christianity as the American national faith, one finds a “hegemonic Christian secularism,” or what used to be called a civil religion consisting of public commitment to the country’s democratic mission (214). Escape from Puritanism’s intolerance, in other words, has been illusory. This is not a new thesis. Perry Miller spent his career documenting the capacity for self-transformation of the Reformed tradition, as did Max Weber before him, and although neither man explicitly named romantic nationalism or capitalist entrepreneurship a religion, they did not naïvely think of secularism as a simple mood of detachment but rather as a mind-set friendly to potent ideologies descended from faith. What distinguishes Fessenden from them is how dark her vision is. The American Protestant legacy uniformly oppresses, and she offers scholarly cultural criticism as the instrument to unmask popular errors. Her initial pessimism grows, however, from a questionably selective reading of American religious history.

Fessenden’s bird’s-eye view of denominational and sectarian disagreements all but erases religious self-reflection and dialogue. After admirably [End Page 376] criticizing the current American habit of instantly equating all “religion” with conservative Christianity, she turns around to lump together Protestants over four centuries by virtue of their shared anti-Catholicism. Her chapter title, “From Disestablishment to ‘Consensus,’” for example, means that the First Amendment to the Constitution inspired an ecumenical Protestant campaign to make public schools places of indoctrination in commonly held views. The degree of truth to this argument should be appreciated along with its presentist orientation: doctrinal differences among Protestants that have seemed increasingly unimportant since World War II were once worth fighting for, and they produced widely diverging political stances. Baptists and Quakers championed religious disestablishment in the early republic, while Congregationalists deplored it. Unitarians joined Catholics, Jews, and Deists after the Civil War to block a constitutional “Christian” amendment, in opposition the initiative’s Methodist and Presbyterian supporters. Elemental as anti-Catholicism was in Protestant America, the behavior of Protestants has not been wholly predetermined by prejudice, and yet Fessenden’s decision to emphasize instances of bigotry makes Protestants seem pawns of destructive convictions. We may reject the religious logic of historical figures, I believe, but we first ought to get close enough to them to discover their reasoning.

A book so concerned with the repressive potential of Protestantism at its ethnic and racial boundaries also remains surprisingly focused on the Protestant mainstream. Although Fessenden makes the Catholicism of F. Scott Fitzgerald the historical endpoint of an analysis that begins with the Puritans, she devotes almost no attention in between to non-Protestants. Minority writing, she clarifies briefly, signified “resistance” (106). Catholics and Jews, however, the most visible non-Protestants before the 1960s, supported healthy literatures that were not solely defined by feelings of disadvantage. Mathew Carey (1760–1839), the Philadelphia publisher and a staunch Catholic, chose the Catholic Douai text of the Bible in 1790 for his first edition of scripture, but he used the Protestant King James Version for more than sixty printings of the Bible after 1800. He was not at war with Protestant culture. Jewish immigrants living after 1880 in the crowded poverty of New York’s Lower East Side felt liberated by their tawdry share of American commodities because they remembered far worse deprivation at home. Reform Judaism became the dominant American practice precisely because Jews embraced their new land as nearly free of age-old prejudices. The self...

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