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  • Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature
  • Jon Pahl
Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature. By Tracy Fessenden. (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007). 352 pp. $37.50.

Tracy Fessenden, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Women's and Gender Studies at Arizona State University, has written a book in Culture and Redemption that will challenge many readers of this journal. Several chapters bear directly on the history of children and youth, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of the United States. This is a bold and important book.

Fessenden's basic argument is that constructions of "the secular" in American history and literature have, ironically, contributed to a durable Christian domination of public discourse about religion. Fessenden contends that secularism, when constructed as the "absence of religious faith," has allowed Christianity, and particularly Protestantism, to go unmarked for its influences on developments in the history of the United States (pp. 6–7). This argument bears with particular salience on the history of children and youth, where a largely unquestioned assumption about the "secularization" of childhood, or about the gradual diminution of influence by religious institutions on coming of age, has been a prevailing narrative from Joseph Kett to Paula Fass to Harvey Graff and Steven Mintz. Fessenden's work suggests that this narrative is neither accurate nor innocent. Instead, such narratives of secularization construct a version of American history "blind to its own exclusions," in which vestiges of Protestant influence go unmarked for their durable influence. This is especially important, of course, in the history of childhood and youth, or in intergenerational relations more broadly.

The argument proceeds in two parts. Part one maps "Protestantism and the Social Space of Reading." Part two focuses on "Secular Fictions." In the latter, Fessenden reveals her facility as a reader of literature by devoting discrete chapters to Uncle Tom's Cabin, Mark Twain (especially Huckleberry Finn), Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (a largely forgotten but wildly popular novel from [End Page 285] the first wave of feminism), and the delightfully titled "F. Scott Fitzgerald's Catholic Closet." The latter chapter actually extends Fessenden's argument to include the ways Catholicism also appears in muted, "innocent" forms that contest with Protestantism for public attention. Each of these chapters is extraordinarily rich. Collectively, they reward readers with deft interpretations that resist easy reduction.

But it is part one that bears particular interest for historians of children and youth. In chapter one, "Legible Dominion: Puritanism's New World Narrative," Fessenden shows how the Puritan project of possessing the "wilderness" operated "by subsuming . . . acts of violence under the transcendent, redemptive authority of the Christian Word" (p. 17). In other words, the Protestant project of word-based religiosity, including broad training in literacy, coincided with, if it did not produce, land possession and the genocide of first peoples. Puritan "iconoclasm" operated as a "literal-spiritual enterprise" of founding a New World in which literacy defined the "civilized" and justified the exclusion of the "heathen." This argument is subject to critique: might the "transcendent Word," for instance, also have promoted the rule of law in which all citizens (and perhaps even all people) participated? But Fessenden's thesis about early American religion clearly has implications for the study of children and youth in early America, given the extensive energies expended (and documentary record left behind) by the Puritans in relation to child-rearing and coming-of-age. "Becoming American," Fessenden suggests, continued to bear religious significance long after Puritan sermons gave way to Yankee entrepreneurialism (p. 33).

In chapter two, "Protestant Expansion, Indian Violence, and Childhood Death: The New England Primer," Fessenden focuses the argument of chapter one on a durable and influential text. In The New England Primer, she argues, Protestantism was transmuted into an "enthnoreligion" that explicitly excluded Indians, Catholics, and Infidels in ways not largely recognized by many historians of childhood and youth in the Early Republic. "Childhood," she argues, "like the Indian world, was the state that Puritans vigorously defined their own religious and civil maturity against—hence the violent nature of much reflection on either" (p. 35). Fessenden here reinforces and extends our complex...

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