The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840--1900

Preface

PREFACE In 1869 Catharine Beecher and her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe included in their book, The American Woman's Home, drawings for a house church. This building, which could also serve as a school, had a steeple for a chimney and a movable screen to convert the parlor into a nave. For the practical Beecher sisters the idea that a house was a church seemed natural. They would have agreed with Father Bernard O'Reilly when he wrote a decade later that a true home is "a bright temple filled with the light of God's presence, blessed and protected by God's visiting angels, and fragrant with the odor of paradise." For the good Christians of the nineteenth century the connection between religion and home was natural and inseparable.l The creators of nineteenth-century culture-ministers, priests, reformers , novelists, architects--saw the home as a vehicle for the promotion of values. Both Protestants and Catholics held that domestic values were eternal, unchanging, and God-given. Like the church, the home (as both a physical space and a kinship structure) promoted a religious perspective. By studying the private aspect of American culture we can clarify the impact Victorian Christianity had on shaping attitudes toward domesticity. Conversely, we can evaluate how beliefs in the divine nature of the home created a particular form of American popular piety. Historians of the nineteenth century explore the nature of sex roles, labor, childhood, demographics, and ethnicity but ignore the relationship between religion and the home. Recent writers on women's history come close to understanding the religious role of the family, but then stop at noting the changing educational role of mothers and the relationship between women and a "feminized" Protestantism. Scholars of religion examine the social dimension of Christianity and the ways individuals experience the sacred, but not the family's position as middle ground between the community and the self. Turning away from one of the richer dimensions of American religion, they have been slow to integrate material culture into their writings. Provocative studies of the relationship between Protestantism and American culture have appeared recently, but few Catholic historians have followed suit. Catholic historical studies continue to center on bishops and their dioceses, educational institutions, priests, and nuns rather xU! XIV Preface ''A Christian House." Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman's Home, p. 23. than the laity. Writers have assumed too often that American popular culture is Protestant while Catholic culture is somehow "European." By presenting an analysis of the domestic ideology used by Protestants and Catholics, the present study seeks to create a fuller picture of American Christianity. It focuses on the philosophy which articulated the home's sacred character, the rituals which instilled that philosophy , and the props advertised to elicit religious sentiments. Protestants and Catholics described their own visions of a "Christian" America in terms of the spiritual quality of the home. The home was not only a private sphere unconnected to society but the starting point for shaping the public world. Victorian Christians drew from a long Preface xv tradition of attitudes toward the family, modifying to fit their cultural situation. Contrasts in Protestant and Catholic expression of domestic sentiments form an important part of the study and highlight the issues of cultural assimilation, social change, and religious antagonism . To what extent families participated in domestic religion is not my major concern. My attention centers on understanding the various cultural systems that Protestants and Catholics believed articulated the proper Christian home. Domestic advice books, novels, and home design manuals were popular during the nineteenth century. They colored the perspectives of their readers, if not their practice. Advertisers in religious newspapers expected to sell their parlor organs, family prayer books, and lithographs of Catholic clergy. Clearly people do not always do what they are told to do, but cultural norms are not easily ignored. Although Protestantism always supported the religious role of the family, interest in domestic piety increased between 1830 and 1870. This period saw the assertion of the evangelical denominations' vision of a Christian America. The major Protestant churches of the nineteenth century (Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian) and many of the smaller ones (Congregational, Disciples of Christ, United Brethren) embraced the hope for a Bible-based, Christian America. Even Episcopalian and Lutheran churches had evangelical branches. Evangelical denominations promoted domestic religion as a means of civilizing America, and their popular literature...