Repairing the Ladder to Heaven: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing as a Secular Novel

Harriet Beecher Stowe and the novel form have both long been associated with the secular. But scholars often conflate two definitions of “secular,” one being the sense of “earthly,” the other the sense of “antireligious.” This causes them to misread Stowe as moving away from religion. In The Minister’s Wooing, Stowe criticizes a type of Calvinism by emphasizing earthly experience as a source of religious knowledge. Both the theologians she examines and many modern critics assume a binary between the secular and the religious that Stowe dismantles. The novel form, far from inherently irreligious, was ideal for her theological purposes.