Heaven in the American Imagination by Gary Scott Smith (review)

What is life in heaven like? On which grounds are people admitted to celestial bliss? When studying the answers, we discover not one uniform set of Christian ideas, but a range of significant variations and emphases that challenge the historian to collect, analyze, and interpret the sources and thus contribute to social and cultural history. Gary Scott Smith, who teaches history at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, collected the answers of theologians and popular authors of North America, or more precisely, of the United States. He begins with Increase Mather's Meditations upon the Glories of the Heavenly World (1711) and ends with the memorial service held for the pop-singer Michael Jackson in Los Angeles on July 7, 2009. Although he occasionally makes reference to Catholics, Mormons, and Jews, the author's focus is on the WASP majority—white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Only in the interesting chapter on the admission of black slaves to heaven (as seen from both the white and the black perspective) does the author widen his focus.

As far as the interpretation of the sources is concerned, Smith stays broadly within the "Lang-McDannell paradigm" (as suggested in Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History [New Haven, 1988; 2nd ed., 2001]). This paradigm distinguishes between two emphases in the description of life everlasting: a theocentric one that thinks of the blessed as eternally enjoying God's presence and worshiping the Trinity, and an anthropocentric one that considers heaven a place for meeting one's partners, family, and friends, as well as for a multiplicity of cultural activities. In American portraits of heaven, there is a clear shift from Puritan theocentrism to nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthropocentrism. Smith discerns several recent trends in American heavenly speculations. Although still considering faith in Christ as the standard condition for admission to heaven, prominent evangelical preachers refuse to pronounce a verdict on the eternal fate of atheists, Buddhists, Muslims, or Jews, leaving the decision, as they say, to God; people nowadays pick up their ideas about heaven more from the popular media than from religious books and sermons; recent popular discourse on the afterlife tends to offer therapeutic or entertainment-oriented portraits of the afterlife—individuals will finally come to terms with their past lives, or they will find themselves in a never-ending amusement park.

All of this is well observed and argued. However, the book has its limitations. Did Americans formerly derive their notions of heaven only from books written and sermons preached in America, as the author seems to imply? They also were significantly inspired by two European authors who, although mentioned in the book, do not receive the attention there that they deserve: John Bunyan and Emanuel Swedenborg. The work of these writers helps account more fully for belief in the continuation of the marital bond in the afterlife, a belief that Smith claims was held by most Christians of all eras. The truth is that Jesus reportedly explained that, in the other world, people "neither marry, nor are given in marriage" (Luke 20.35), and those who preferred to think otherwise had to find clever interpretations of the biblical passage. But Americans had read the second volume of the Pilgrim's Progress (as they did the first), absorbing its message, and Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell gave rise to more than the celestial novels of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Nevertheless, Smith has written a stimulating and well-documented book that will further promote thinking on this subject of perennial interest.