Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction by Kathryn Gin Lum (review)

Studies of American demonology are nearly as commonplace as the idioms they aim to interpret. In a fraught time, there is nonetheless room for scholarship that not only addresses fresh archives or renders the known elegantly but also clarifies and illumines. Kathryn Gin Lum’s superb monograph accomplishes each of these objectives and is among the more compelling historical analyses published in recent years. Looking to the early republic, Lum aims to show how “[t]he belief that one’s own eternal safety was tied to the sins of others … invested Americans in the welfare of their peers at home and abroad” (p. 233). This attention to interdependency and intersubjectivity, as well as to the fluidity of hellfire discourses, is the chief distinguishing feature of this work.

Much scholarship focused in this area tends to concentrate on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, scrutinizing the perhaps improbable longevity of these tropes. Lum’s earlier chronological focus not only provides historical balance to the literature but, more importantly, shows that fears of damnation were constitutive of American identities all along. During each phase of her narrative, Lum focuses not just on the geographic and demographic reach of the discourses but on their fluidity. In the book’s first phase, Lum maps the discourse’s production and dissemination by preachers and theologians whose profound disagreements over issues like free will, social engagement, and heresy exemplify the interpretive range that is Lum’s concern. She convinces that political will-formation in the early republic—in which “fear of the sovereign could be replaced by fear of God” (p. 29)—depended on these categories, eliding self-discipline with self-creation. In her reading of evangelical discourse—ripe with fears of atheism and declension—she scrupulously avoids social control reductionism without abandoning a focus on political order. Lum is attentive to the rise and fall of damnation rhetoric, tracing the social implications of its diminution as carefully as the needs that shape its coalescence in print culture, sermons, proselytization efforts, and associational networks that debated techniques and outcomes alike.

This very fluidity, Lum contends, is what made for such close interleavings of hellfire discourse with new religions, social reform, and national concerns alike. Some of Lum’s most compelling work documents just these intersections, as with her tracing of the national and global imaginaries produced via missionary activity (the settling of frontiers always looked to “heathens” as justification) and to debates about gender and racial difference (there is a marvelous reading of guidebooks explaining gender and family roles). In one of the most fascinating sections, Lum shows that hellfire language was central to discourses of religion and mental health/insanity (p. 117). While Lum’s reading of slavery and the Civil War does not possess quite the same creativity as the rest of her book, her broad investigation of new religions and religious fusions—from Handsome Lake to Mormons to Swedenborgianism—is fresh and innovative.

It is an extremely impressive book, one that challenges scholarly and cultural conceptions of the unidirectionality of hellfire discourse. Through rigorous archival work, well-chosen themes and exemplars, and vivid writing, Lum produces a broad new look at the nineteenth century that is attentive to the lived world of practitioners, not just to idea, and is alive with abiding tensions and blurred boundaries.