American Primer: Religion in Early American Studies

At the recent millennium, several scholars were asked to respond to a retrospective and prospective view of early American literary studies that I offered in the William and Mary Quarterly. One of them, David Shields, then newly anointed editor of Early American Literature and a veteran of that journal’s editorial board, opined that “no one reading manuscripts submitted to the academic presses and journals during the past decade can escape the conviction that theological literacy among early Americanists has declined” (Shields 639). In the previous decade the field of early American literature had opened in remarkable new directions—indeed, it had become the field of early American studies—as scholars began to examine such topics as a widespread “club culture” with its extensive circulation of manuscripts, the literature of the “Atlantic Rim,” including as it did Africa and the Caribbean, and all manner of hitherto little-remarked texts that spoke to issues of race, gender, and ethnicity. If younger scholars of early American literature broached a once-central subject like, say, Puritanism, it was to use it as a frame to examine another topic that seemed more important, as is the case in the James Egan’s Authorizing Experience (1999), Sandra Gustafson’s Eloquence Is Power (2000), Phillip Round’s By Nature and Custom Cursed (1999), and Nancy Ruttenberg’s Democratic Personality (1998). Shields’s observation echoed what many trained in the 1970s had observed, publicly and privately, as fewer doctoral students took the time to learn the intricacies of seventeenth- or eighteenth-century religion. Early American studies had indeed become a brave, new world.

But, ironically, even as scholars in our field seem less willing to parse the intricacies of theology or ecclesiology, the past few years have seen the publication of several benchmark studies that re-inscribe the importance of early American religious thought, books of central value to students of early American literature and culture. One of these provides a definitive account of the development of American Christianity, in its myriad denominational incarnations, from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century; another treats with similar completeness a seemingly idiosyncratic strain of religious belief that in fact has proved central to this country’s religious experience over three centuries; yet another offers a provocative reading of Protestantism’s role in the shaping of our national mythology. These are weighty books by well-established scholars; anyone, graduate student or professor, ignores them at his or her intellectual peril.

In this cynical age, the word “monumental” is overused, but E. Brooks Holifield’s Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War is quite simply that, the result of a career’s worth of study and cogitation on the full rage of the American religious experience. Its scholarly weight bears comparison to A Religious History of the American People (1972) by Holifield’s mentor, Sydney Ahlstrom. Holified, however, is after different game, specifically a history of doctrine, of what the American people through time have made of Christianity. A professor of American church history at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, Holifield began his career with a definitive work on English and American Puritanism, The Covenant Sealed: The Development of Puritan Sacramental Theology in Old and New England (1974), essential to those in early American literature interested, say, in Edward Taylor and the Mathers, as well as in Jonathan Edwards. He followed this with Era of Persuasion: American Thought and Culture, 1521–1680 (1989), one of the better books in Twayne’s “American Thought and Culture” series. Since then he presumably had set himself to Theology in America, a decade and a...