Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution

Preface

Preface Prophets are messengers. They listen to frequencies few others can or want to hear, for warning signs-signs that things are not what they seem, that trouble is coming. More often than not, they are lonely figures, their advice ignored and mocked by those who most need it. The "company of prophets" who visited Anglo-America in the war-torn years ofl765-1815 was, I think, particularly good at conveying certain messages, though not always the ones intended. They certainly taught me a lot about the nature of public life in the late eighteenth century, about the meaning of categories like "the Enlightenment ;' rational religion, imposture, authenticity, and revelation. The popularity prophets enjoyed in the late eighteenth century, the celebrated "age of reason;' may seem puzzling at first. How, we might ask, did eighteenth-century believers reconcile their newfound scientific and intellectual convictions with a religious practice as ancient as the Old Testament itself ? Is prophecy best understood as a relic-an archaic remnant of some premodern religious sensibility lurking below the surface of a rapidly modernizing culture, as a living adaptation of a traditional practice to a new set of cultural and intellectual imperatives, or as something else entirely? Who believed in these messengers of doom, anyway, and why? Did prophets appeal to the most traditional members of Anglo-American society, those for whom the promises of economic and social advancement held out by a liberal commercial and political order failed to materialize, or did they draw their converts across a wide spectrum of social and political groups? Did a belief in the kind of savage justice promised by prophets undercut the liberal humanitarian ethos which seemed to be ascendant in the public culture of Anglo-America, or did prophets adjust their fire-and-brimstone message to the more delicate sensibilities of their modem-minded audience? All of these questions, as phrased, presume an essential tension or in- viii Preface compatibility between religious faith and the enlightenment, between the ancient need to mortify the self and the newer desire to ennoble it. That these two impulses were in tension throughout the eighteenth century is, I think, beyond dispute; that they represented fundamentally alien ways ofliving in and with the world is less clear. Historians such as Phyllis Mack, Leigh Eric Schmidt, David Hall, Jon Butler and others have argued forcefully and persuasively that the old binaries (faith versus reason, primitive versus modern , orality versus literacy, magic versus science) are inadequate to capturing the full complexity of Anglo-American religious culture as it evolved in the century and a half following the chaotic violence of the English Civil War and the conciliatory gestures of the Restoration era. Phyllis Mack's most recent work, in particular, has helped me to see the myriad connections between the enlightened ideal of self-realization and the evangelical campaign to contain, control, and redirect the self and its appetites. Rather than offering a counternarrative of self-abnegation and political loss, the rise of evangelical Protestantism to a position of cultural authority in both England and North America after 1750 provided, she argues, a highly sophisticated and effective set of emotional and intellectual disciplines by which the enlightened ideal (shorn of its most arrogant presuppositions) could be realized. There was not, it now seems, a bloody war of attrition between two fully articulated and incompatible visions of the human condition vying for supremacy over the course of the eighteenth century, but a far more messy entanglement of ideas in which the discrete strands are often impossible to distinguish, let alone meaningfully disentangle. Neither an archaic remnant nor a novel practice, prophecy in the revolutionary era (defined by most historians as the half-century from the onset of the American Revolution to the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815) was a cultural hybrid, rooted both in the primitive worldview of the Old Testament and in the vibrant intellectual environment of the philosophes and their political allies, the republicans. Even to phrase its genealogy in these terms, however, is misleading, for the notion of a "hybrid" suggests a coming together of two things, and what I propose is that we stop seeing the enlightenment and religious enthusiasm as distinct and antagonistic forces. Believers like John Wesley certainly found no contradiction in being both a man of science and a man of intense faith, and we can learn from his example . Prophets, too, rarely felt the need to declare their allegiance to one worldview or another: Richard...