Sacred Borders: Continuing Revelation and Canonical Restraint in Early America (review)

Mankind has questioned the nature and alleged sources of revelation from God since Satan asked Eve, “Hath God said?” Sacred Borders traces the participation of antebellum Americans in this ongoing discussion. The title represents a metaphor that Holland uses throughout—the books of the biblical canon forming a border to be defended or crossed. He sees his work as patrolling “the borderlands” to witness challenges to the canon and attempts to protect it from encroachment. Although his account is fundamentally chronological, Holland identifies important patterns that connect movements, groups, and individuals separated by decades and even centuries. Some of the names are familiar; many of them would be known only to religious-history specialists. Puritans, deists, Unitarians, Quakers, Shakers, Native Americans, African Americans, Mormons, Millerites, Seventh-day Adventists, and Transcendentalists are all represented, as are Jonathan Edwards, Ethan Allen, Emanuel Swedenborg, Ellen White, Joseph Smith, William Ellery Channing, Orestes Brownson, and a host of others.

Holland confesses that he was surprised to discover that most of his subjects placed the nature or character of God at the crux of their concerns. Is God simply benevolence personified or a complex mix of attributes? Given His nature, must He communicate with everyone at all times, or is communication with a particular group during particular times sufficient? Does God communicate with individuals for their own private edification or only publicly for the benefit of all? Must God’s revelation to man be supernatural in character or does He speak predominately through nature and natural impulses? Holland’s treatment of these and other questions centers on religious history, but it intersects with, and draws from, theology, politics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, ethnic studies, and law.

Holland approaches the subject with what may well be the only suitable method. He uses a myriad of primary source materials from the period, including sermons, correspondence, personal journals, newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, poetry, treatises, and autobiographies in order to investigate people’s beliefs. He explains that much of the research was done “the old-fashioned way: in the stacks, in the special collections, and at the microfilm reader,” but that he also made extensive use of electronic databases that allowed him to “survey vast amounts of historical terrain in search of patterns” (219). He used hardcopies or microfilm of all electronic sources that did not “provide actual facsimiles of the documents, citing nothing that [he] had not examined in its original form or photographic reproduction” (220). Secondary sources present commentary and broader historical context, but Holland allows people to speak for themselves regarding belief.

Holland’s analysis of “continuing revelation” is more convincing than is his analysis of “challenges to the canon.” The two terms are not synonymous, despite his conveniently constructed definition emphasizing “functional equivalency” (9). Sacred Borders is predominately about various theories and claims of continuing revelation, discussing only a few actual challenges to the canon in the normal understanding of the term—like adding the Book of Mormon or the Shakers’ Sacred Roll to it. The coverage is comprehensive and informative, and even though Holland’s style is turgid, the threads of his argument come together persuasively in the end.