Post-secular Puritans: Recent Retrials of Anne Hutchinson

In the last ten years or so, Puritan studies has witnessed many efforts from scholars representing an array of disciplinary and methodological orientations to find different ways to understand the importance of religion for Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy. This reenergized focus on religion in Puritan studies has coincided with a larger trend in the study of religion in many disciplines across the humanities and social sciences: the emergence of what has come to be known as post-secular theory. This essay brings these two trends into direct conversation in an effort to gain some insight into recent innovations in the study of religion and secularity. Such an engagement is not meant to imply that most of the scholars under consideration in this essay would identify their work as post-secular. Nor is it a goal here to offer a post-secular reading of Hutchinson's trials; such a reading could prove quite interesting, but is beyond the scope of this essay. Rather the essay is a methodological and historiographical case study, with scholarship on Hutchinson serving as the primary focus of inquiry. The aim of such a case study, then, is to describe and analyze some recent approaches to religion—in the trials and in Puritan studies more generally—as a way to illustrate the kinds of methodological questions post-secular theory attempts to address.¹

Within the limited parameters of this investigation—scholarship in the last ten years on religion in the Antinomian Controversy—the perspective nevertheless remains intentionally broad.² The intent is not to quibble with particular readings of particular moments in the trials, but rather to offer a speculative and suggestive overview of various theoretical and methodological approaches. To that end, the essay begins with a thematic summary of some of the major questions and premises of post-secular theory, and then looks at two recent developments in Hutchinson scholarship: those efforts to return religion to the center of our understanding of the trials through careful reconstruction of historical and theological contexts; and those efforts to rethink questions of individual agency and subjectivity by rethinking the relationships between the terms in which that subjectivity has long been framed: male/female, public/private, and secular/religious.

A "Return of Religion"

In the last ten years or so, literary studies and other academic disciplines have been experiencing a so-called return of religion.³ In the broadest sense, this return has called for revising an attitude toward religion that has been characterized as hostile or indifferent, and adopting instead methodological approaches that attempt to take religion seriously. While scholars have never stopped writing about religion, they often did so—as the return narrative has it—as if it were merely a mask for economic, political, or cultural concerns. Attempts to engage religion on its own terms have included general cultural studies approaches—where religion has been added to the list of significant cultural discourses that had already included race, class, sexuality, and gender (e.g., Mizruchi; Franchot). There have also been efforts not only to take religion seriously as an object of scholarly investigation, but also as a legitimate subject position from which to conduct scholarship. Scholars such as George Marsden, for example, have advocated writing history from an openly Christian perspective.

However this return of religion may generally manifest itself in various academic quarters, in the case of Puritan studies it is somewhat of a challenge to imagine such a return to a field where religion never really left. From Perry Miller through Sacvan Bercovitch and right up to recent work from Michael Colacurcio, religion has been very much at the center of Puritan studies.⁴ While there have always been prominent scholars who did not especially emphasize religion or theology (Bernard Bailyn, perhaps most famously), it is nevertheless difficult to make the case that religion has largely been ignored by scholars of Puritanism and now needs to return. So any speculation about a new approach or new method for studying religion must be cognizant of this long and continuing tradition, and acknowledge the ways in which previous scholarship may...