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The Secularization Narrative and Nineteenth-Century American Literature
In the Custom-House where he finds the scarlet letter, the narrator of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) ponders his Puritan ancestry with some measure of trepidation. “[H]e had all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil” the narrator says of his early ancestor. “He was likewise a bitter persecutor. … His son, too, inherited the persecuting spirit, and made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may be fairly said to have left a stain upon him” (27). Religious fervor, indeed religious violence, is a formative component of the narrator’s family stock. The narrator, however, is little like his “sable-cloaked and steeple-crowned progenitor,” who would be horrified to discover that “the old trunk of the family tree, with so much venerable moss upon it, should have borne, at its topmost bough, an idler like myself” (26–7). “A writer of story books!” the narrator imagines the Puritans to proclaim. “What kind of business in life, – what mode of glorifying God … may that be?” (27). Generations, it seems, have filtered out the family’s religious commitments and replaced them with literary as well as practical concerns. The narrator deems the scarlet letter an opportunity to jumpstart his “intellectual machinery” in service of his bank account: “do this,” he fantasizes when pondering The Scarlet Letter’s composition, “and the profit shall be all your own” (51, 44). He thus appears to be a rational citizen, one who asserts that a “man of thought, fancy, and sensibility … may, at any time, be a man of affairs” (39). Pragmatic, reasonable, and thoughtful, Hawthorne’s narrator is a picture of modernity’s triumph over religious zeal. His idle creativity might mark a decline from the lofty pursuits of his orthodox forebears, but at least he has never hanged a suspected witch (or affixed an “A” to a lonely woman’s dress).
In its depiction of waning religious conviction, Hawthorne’s Custom-House preface rehearses a narrative that resonates through much discourse about the history of US religion and literature. That narrative, put simply, is one in which the nation gradually unburdens itself of religious zeal and in doing so embraces a modernity that privileges reason over faith. This is the story of secularization, a story of US culture shrugging off what Linell Cady terms the “yoke of religion” and assuming the mantle of enlightenment (874). This configuring of secularism differs from the notion of a separation of church and state in that it treats the secular as a broader and more diffuse component of culture, one that pervades individual experience as well as institutions. Until recently, much critical work on US literature has taken the secularization narrative for granted. Drawing on Perry Miller’s foundational essay, “From Edwards to Emerson,” twentieth-century scholars charted a trajectory in which science, aesthetics, and philosophy supplanted theology over the course of the nineteenth century. As Joanna Brooks puts it,
Miller gave us the gentlest and most elegant way of telling the children that at some point even the best and brightest Puritans could keep it up no longer, that they stopped believing what their grandfathers believed, and that it was, finally, really, okay because it gave us literature. (426)
The secularization narrative has taken many forms in criticism. In Ann Douglas’s famous version, religion evolves into a “feminine” concern in the nineteenth century, the purview of increasingly impotent clergymen and sentimental women. In many studies of US literature, though, the secularization narrative operates simply as the absence of attention to religion – an unarticulated positioning of religion as a concern merely of the religious – and the framing of literature as somehow largely distinct from religion and its concerns.
Of course, the story of religion’s departure from the literary realm becomes less stable upon closer interrogation of what, precisely, constitutes the “secular” or the “religious.” New scholarship on religion and literature has brought to light the fault lines in the secularization narrative while also calling into question the very notion of secularism. This work takes seriously Talal Asad’s assertions that “there is nothing essentially religious” and that “the secular is neither singular in origin nor stable in its historical identity” (25). Asad deploys a deconstructive methodology that is common in literary studies of race and gender but remains an emerging effort in the study of religion. The often unspoken reification of the “religious–secular” binary may owe more, Michael Kaufmann suggests, to the status of religion within literary studies as a discipline committed to its own story of secular progress than to literary works themselves. The secularization narrative, he argues, has allowed literary studies “to treat (or ignore) both the secular and the religious as if they were normative, fixed categories” (609). As Vincent Pecora’s work on the fraught relationship between religion and academic criticism demonstrates, the secular has as rich and complex a history as any other cultural category. Though critics often treat it as self-evident, the term “secular” has referred, over centuries and across continents, to everything from clerical worldliness, to anticlericalism, to empiricism, to religious disestablishment, to humanism, to modernization, to even cosmopolitanism. Thus it does not merely mark the absence that opposes religion’s presence. Rather, like religion, the secular is composed of historically contingent and ever-evolving sets of beliefs, assumptions, institutions, experiences, and modes.
This chapter explores three models for reconsidering the concepts of secularism and secularization in early and nineteenth-century US literature. The first is to recognize the ways in which literary productions of this era complicate both the secularization narrative and the ostensible divide between the religious and the secular. To this end, I examine Charles Brockden Brown’s early novel, Wieland, or, the Transformation: An American Tale (1798), the horror of which emanates, I argue, from its refusal to discriminate between secular and religious epistemologies. Another possible model for inquiry into this topic is a renewed attention to the literary investments of “sacred” American texts. In this chapter’s second section, I read The Book of Mormon (1830) as a set of narratives structured by a logic of prophesy that facilitates the sacralizing (rather than the secularizing) of American history. Finally, a third model for reconsidering the relationship between religion and literature involves interrogating the potentially religious assumptions that underscore literary analysis itself. This chapter’s final section thus reads W.E.B. Du Bois’s rendering of African American literary genealogies as a reflection of an ostensibly secular reading practice with religious roots. In each of these sections, my aim is to demonstrate the contingent and mutually constitutive tensions between not only the literary and the religious but also the religious and the “not religious.” Though each approaches the question of secularization from a different perspective, these sections together explore an American literary tradition in which faith and reason are indistinguishable, and the sacred merges with the profane.
My particular area of study – Protestantism, Catholicism, and formulations of democracy in the early United States – frames my approach to this topic, and this chapter focuses on writers working from a range of perspectives at least loosely tied to Christianity. But this is not to suggest that Christianity, or even some vaguely construed “Judeo-Christian tradition,” is the only vantage point from which to consider questions of the secular. Secularism often appears as the gift Christianity has given itself by becoming, in Marcel Gauchet’s words, “a religion for departing from religion,” and thus “the most relevant religion in a post-religious society” (4). Even Charles Taylor’s extensive study of the subject begins with the assertion that the “we” who inhabit a “secular age” are “the ‘we’ who live in the West, or perhaps Northwest, or otherwise put, the North Atlantic world” (1). Though his terminology is geographic, Taylor’s implication is religious: “we” are secular now, because we have been Christian in the past. New studies of secularism by scholars such as Asad and Gil Anidjar have begun to address Christianity’s unspoken centrality to philosophies of the secular and to highlight the ways in which, as Michael Kiser puts it, “ostensibly universal secular norms are in fact hypostasizations of particular Euro-Christian epistemologies and the imperial geopolitical aims that have accompanied them” (335). The challenge facing scholars of American religion and literature is to develop more lines of inquiry that address secularity’s relationship to traditions beyond Christianity while also interrogating Christianity’s own claims of ownership over secularism. This chapter analyzes texts that straddle the perceived divide between Christianity and secularism to show how the two operate in tension and in tangent within US literature.
Thirsting for Knowledge: Wieland and the End of Epistemology
Brown’s first published novel, Wieland, opens with a brief tale of religious fervor and spontaneous combustion. Theodore Wieland, Sr. – the sole member of a fundamentalist sect of his own design – falls into a depression upon failing to complete a task he believes his god has demanded of him. “A command had been laid upon him,” his daughter Clara, the novel’s narrator, explains, “which he had delayed to perform. … He was no longer permitted to obey.” No one knows the terms the elder Wieland has violated, and thus no one can console him as he spends his days “haunted by the belief that the kind of death that await[s] him [will be] strange and terrible” (14). It is in this unhappy state that the father retires to the temple he built in honor of his god, and then suddenly and mysteriously bursts into flames. When his relatives find him, he is “naked, the skin throughout the greater part of his body … scorched and bruised” (18). They take him home, where he smolders for two hours before expiring. Fast-forward two decades, and the Wieland children have not only inherited but also transformed their father’s property. Clara informs readers that she and her brother have converted their father’s temple into a kind of rustic salon. A bust of Cicero has replaced the ultimate burnt offering, and the younger Wielands study, sing, converse, and enjoy fine meals where their father once prayed. Theodore Wieland, Jr., Clara explains, may have inherited their father’s intensity, but “the mind of the son was enriched by science, and embellished with literature” (22). An “indefatigable student” and committed deist, Wieland is not without religious commitments, but he feels most affronted when “the divinity of Cicero [is] contested,” and his best friend, Pleyel, “reject[s] all guidance but that of his reason” (26). Having turned away from religious “fanaticism” and toward secular pursuits, the Wielands have achieved stability and happiness.
At first, Brown’s novel follows the secularization narrative that critics have long assumed to structure early US literary productions. Educated, thoughtful, and moderate, the Wielands seem the kind of stock out of which Hawthorne’s Custom-House narrator and his ilk will spring. Intellectualism has made the Wielands so liberal in their attitudes that they even welcome a Catholic into their midst. Catholicism, of course, appeared in much early US discourse as a menacing force, a bearer of despotic superstition and violence (Fenton; Franchot; Fessenden Culture; Griffin Anti-Catholicism). And yet, when the Wielands encounter Carwin, a Catholic convert wandering around their homes, they welcome him. “It was not easy to reconcile his conversion to the Romish faith,” Clara admits, “with those proofs of knowledge and capacity that were exhibited by him on different occasions” (65). Nonetheless, Carwin appeals to the Wielands, not because he shares their theological commitments but because he is both articulate and mysterious. “All topics were handled by him with skill, and without pedantry or affectation,” Clara notes, but she also labels Carwin “inscrutable” and professes an inability to determine “whether his fellowship tended to good or evil” (68, 73). A desire to understand, not convert, motivates the Wielands’ interactions with Carwin. They thus work to devise a set of questions in service of that aim. Religious difference precludes neither friendship nor intellectual engagement; it operates, rather, as a premise for discussion and exploration.
Though the Wielands initially offer a picture of secular contentment, Brown’s novel violently collapses the distinction between faith and reason to suggest that the turn away from religion is not necessarily a turn toward enlightened bliss. Clara’s brother may possess a mind “enriched by science,” but when he hears a disembodied voice demand the sacrifice of his wife and their children, he complies. Testifying at his own murder trial, Wieland reveals zeal previously unknown to his family members. “God is the object of my supreme passion,” he explains; “I have thirsted for the knowledge of his will” (158). Her brother’s quest for knowledge, Clara learns, all along has been a quest for access to the divine. Indeed, Wieland’s testimony calls into question the very distinction between empirical and religious truths. He lists the case’s facts: “You know that they are dead, and you know that they were killed by me.” But these truths, Wieland asserts, are insignificant. Asserting that everyone knows “the soundness of his integrity, and the unchangeableness of his principles,” Wieland asks, “Think ye that malice could have urged me to this deed?” (157–8). The past operates as proof of Wieland’s purity of his motive. When the voice commanded, “In proof of thy faith, render me thy wife,” Wieland argues, he had no choice but to obey: “the decree had gone forth, and nothing remained but to execute it’” (160). Here, the line between empiricism and superstition blurs, as Wieland has ostensibly gathered sensory proof – a voice in the night – of God’s design. Only epistemological certainty and clear thinking, he insists, could explain such brutality.
Certainty, however, proves impossible in Brown’s novel. In its refusal to grant narrative closure, Wieland does not merely present religion as a dormant force ready to spring forth from seemingly secular Americans. It instead renders the “religious” and the “not religious” indistinguishable by rendering all epistemologies suspicious. Wieland offers many explanations for Wieland’s phantom voice, but none proves definitive. The court believes Wieland’s account but interprets his testimony as evidence of “sudden madness” and thereby designates his own dysfunctional interior as the source of the voice (170). Clara assigns a different origin to the voice when she discovers Carwin to be a ventriloquist. But though he admits to many ventriloqiual exploits, Carwin insists, “I am not this villain” (189). Wieland believes Clara but deems “the being whom thou callest Carwin … the incarnation of a daemon” (215). And even when she herself hears the voice, Clara’s account of it defies interpretation. Her insistence that “Carwin’s agency was here easily recognized” is undercut by her simultaneous assertion that the voice is “louder than human organs could produce, shriller than language can depict” (219). The voice, it seems, is most certainly human and most certainly beyond the realm of human capability. Empirical knowledge, then, appears no more convincing than revealed religion.
Wieland ultimately offers no satisfying solution to its own riddle of religious violence. It’s not that religion somehow overpowers reason; it’s that reason itself cannot bring order to the novel’s events. Did Wieland really hear a voice? Did it emanate from within his own mind, or was the source external? Did Carwin produce it, or could it have been the voice of God? And what did Clara hear? Was it the same voice, or something else entirely? In the end, Brown’s novel suggests, the answers to these questions are less important than the fact of the questions themselves. “I care not from what source these disasters have flowed,” Clara concludes, “it suffices that they have swallowed up our hopes and our existence” (223). No longer interested in pursuing an authentic or factual account of her brother’s actions, Clara focuses only on their effects. What began as a story of secular progress, then, ends as one in which empiricism fails to resolve narrative dilemmas and religion remains a salient force – one that may hold the key to Wieland’s actions but may just as easily be the product of a brilliant sleight of tongue – despite all claims to the contrary.
Writing at the close of the eighteenth century, Brown was an Anglo-American novelist whose work supposedly inaugurated an increasingly secular US literary tradition. But as early as 1798, Wieland evinces a deep suspicion about the progress narrative that many critics have embraced. The reasons for this are potentially numerous. Brown’s suspicion may have been personal, owing partly to the fact that when he was a child, the Continental Congress’ ad hoc Committee on Spies produced a list of people it deemed dangerous, all of whom were Quakers and one of whom was Brown’s father. Viewed as enemies of the emerging state because of their religious commitment to pacifism and their refusal to take oaths of loyalty, these Quakers were forcibly exiled to Pennsylvania by some of the same men who would produce the nation’s founding documents – including future President John Adams. Peter Kafer’s study of the Continental Congress’ terrorizing of Quakers suggests that Brown learned an early lesson about the violent limits of supposedly moderate religion. And he suggests, convincingly, that it is no accident that Brown sent a copy of Wieland to then Vice President Thomas Jefferson, “a deist who designed his Monticello home as the American epitome of classical proportion” (xi). Described thusly, Jefferson, architect of the Declaration of Independence, sounds a lot like Wieland himself. Brown’s novel, then, might be read as a warning to a nation quick to congratulate itself for its religious liberties while forgetting its past persecutions. But whatever Brown’s particular motives, his novel presents secularization as a dangerous fantasy rather than an inevitable step along the path to modernity.
Prophecy and Sacred American History in The Book of Mormon
In 1830, Joseph Smith, Jr., convinced a printer in Palmyra, New York, to publish what he alleged was a history of ancient civilizations that migrated from what is now the Middle East to the Americas. A purported record of the first Americans, The Book of Mormon centers on two main stories: that of the Jaredites, who fled west in the aftermath of the destruction of the Tower of Babel, and that of the Nephites and Lamanites, splinter sects of a tribe that departed from Jerusalem in 600 BCE. The text, Smith claimed, was a translation of metal plates to which angels had led him in upstate New York. Smith said that he spent years attempting to recover the plates, but it was only in 1827 that God finally allowed him to unearth the stone box containing them and take them home. Though the plates were inscribed in an unfamiliar language – “reformed Egyptian” – Smith asserted that he had deciphered them using a “seer stone.” Like the Bible, the document etched into the plates was ostensibly composed of writings by many authors working across centuries. Smith called his translation The Book of Mormon, because, he said, the prophet-historian Mormon had been the plates’ chief editor. The son of impoverished farmers, Smith had spent his youth hoping to improve his lot by finding either buried treasures or religious enlightenment. The plates suggested that he had found both. The Book of Mormon sold slowly at first, but by the time Smith died in 1844 (at the hands of an angry mob), he was the founder of Mormonism, a new and growing American religion.
It is perhaps not surprising that when The Book of Mormon first appeared, it attracted the ire of prominent Protestant clergymen. Alexander Campbell, founder of the Churches of Christ and a central figure in the Second Great Awakening, published Delusions: An Analysis of the Book of Mormon (1832), a volume intended to “notice the most recent and the most impudent delusion which has appeared in our time” (6). Campbell’s concerns were theological, to be sure, but they were also literary, as his critique centers on the form of Smith’s text as much as its content. Summarizing The Book of Mormon’s plot, Campbell begins, “This romance – but this is for it a name too innocent – begins with the religious adventures of one Lehi” (6). Campbell’s implication is that Smith’s book cannot possibly be a sacred text, because, in its tales of daring escapades in distant locales, it follows the conventions of the era’s popular fiction. Smith’s Lehi, it seems, is little more than an Ivanhoe. Despite the fact that the Bible itself includes many stories of adventure, Campbell assumes The Book of Mormon’s generic traits to be proof of its profanity. He also takes issue with the book’s syntax. “It is patched up and cemented,” he writes, “with ‘And it came to pass’ – ‘I saith unto you’ – ‘He saith unto him’ – and all the King James’ haths, dids, and doths – in the lowest imitation of the common version” (15). Here, again, it seems that Smith has adhered too carefully to convention. The Book of Mormon’s English closely resembles that of the King James Bible; Campbell thus suspects it to be a deliberate fraud. Smith’s work, he argues, poses a threat to Protestant Christianity because its mastery of the romance genre makes it appealing, while its deployment of “sacred” language may fool undiscerning readers into thinking it authentic.
Though nineteenth-century critics approached Smith’s text as a literary as well as theological artifact, critics of our own age have all but ignored The Book of Mormon. As Paul Gutjahr notes in his exceptional study of the book’s place within early US print culture, “Where the book is studied, it is largely examined by those with some connection to its religious tradition or by scholars of American religious history” (276). A simple MLA search bears out Gutjahr’s point: “Joseph Smith” yields fifty-eight results, whereas “James Fenimore Cooper,” Smith’s close contemporary, yields over a thousand. Despite the ever-widening definition of “text” in literary studies, and despite the fact that The Book of Mormon gave rise to one of the most successful and lasting “homegrown” US religions, Smith’s work remains a largely unexamined literary phenomenon. But The Book of Mormon, whatever else it may be, is a work of literature. Smith controlled many aspects of his book’s production, and, as Gutjahr shows, he designed it to look like the bibles already on the shelves in people’s homes. Leather-bound and impressed with gold lettering on its spine, the book looked and felt significant. Produced during a period of debate over whether Christians should read bibles that faithfully translated original documents or those that appeared in idiomatic English, The Book of Mormon, Gutjahr argues, offered readers “a new sacred text translated directly from original source material” (284). As I will demonstrate through analysis of its first two books, it also offered readers a narrative that infused the American landscape with divine significance and thereby produced a history that merges the sacred with the profane.
The Book of Mormon converts American history into Christian mythology mainly through the mode of prophecy. Prophecy, as Paul Ricoeur has argued, is a complicated form of narration, because “God is named in a double first person, as the voice of another in my word” (225). Although The Book of Mormon opens with first-person narration, as Nephi describes a series of revelations, the voice that speaks is often configured as God’s voice through Nephi. Smith’s text uses this device to predict its own nineteenth-century publication and reception. Nephi’s brother Joseph describes his interaction with God in this way:
Thus saith the Lord unto me: a choice seer will I raise up out of the fruit of thy loins. … And unto him will I give commandment, that he shall do a work for the fruit of thy loins, his brethren, which shall be of great worth unto them, even of the bringing of them to the knowledge of the covenants I have made with thy fathers. (66)
For readers uncertain of the seer’s identity, the text provides a pretty clear clue: “And his name shall be called after me,” Joseph says, “and it shall be after the name of his father” (67). Suddenly, the “Joseph” and the “Jr.” in “Joseph Smith, Jr.” take on more than familial significance. The Book of Mormon also anticipates the criticism it will face from people such as Campbell. “And because my words shall hiss forth,” God tells Nephi, “many of the Gentiles shall say: A Bible, a Bible, we have got a Bible, and there cannot be any more Bible” (115). Having foretold its own existence and preemptively refuted its criticisms, The Book of Mormon lays claim to a truth ostensibly as divine as it is tautological. Its very existence proves it to be divinely inspired.
Through prophetic narration, Smith presents the history of the Americas as a foregone and divinely inspired conclusion. In its initial books, Smith’s text is primarily concerned with presenting indigenous Americans as the product of an ancient Israeli migration. “And it came to pass that the Lord spake unto me,” Nephi writes of his prophetic vision, saying, “Thou shalt construct a ship, after the manner which I shall shew thee, that I may carry thy people across these waters” (42). Though Nephi narrates, God speaks. And what God decrees sets the stage for the Americas’ future: Nephi and his family will form the genealogical foundation for the western hemisphere. The actual presence of Native Americans in Smith’s antebellum United States might have suggested the text’s veracity – indigenous people become an effect imagined to prove a cause. This is what Ricoeur refers to as “the paradox of a prophecy heard and received post eventum”: Nephi sees the future, but to Smith’s contemporaries that future is a past that has produced their present (264n3). New research in genetics suggests The Book of Mormon’s account to be implausible, as Native Americans’ lineages can be traced to Asia rather than the Middle East (see Southerton’s work for more information on this topic). I would contend, though, that for literary critics it should be less important to interrogate the book’s claim to authenticity than to explore its construction and effects. As a composite work composed of several books supposedly produced at different times, The Book of Mormon is able to narrate both predictions and their fulfillments. The prophecy-as-narrative mode thus allows Smith’s text to present the hemisphere’s history as teleology. Secularism plays no part in The Book of Mormon’s lexicon; there is no distinction between the sacred and the profane in this imagining of the Americas.
Although Smith was a contemporary of Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Ralph Waldo Emerson – indeed, Smith and Emerson began their careers in the same decade – he rarely appears in critical accounts of what F.O. Matthiessen famously dubbed the “American Renaissance.” Donald Pease reminds us that the phrase “American Renaissance designates a moment in the nation’s history when the ‘classics,’ works ‘original’ enough to lay claim to an ‘authentic’ beginning for America’s literary history, appeared” (vii). Until very recently, Smith’s work has been absent from even the many revisions of Matthiessen’s admittedly limited formulation, as The Book of Mormon’s overt religiosity has seemed to distinguish it from the emerging “canon” of US literature. But as new efforts to contextualize Smith have demonstrated, his writing shares concerns as well as narrative techniques with that of the era’s most recognizable literary figures (Neilsen and Givens). Richard Brodhead, for example, shows that, although their aims differ, Smith and Emerson share an investment in prophecy. Noting that Emerson’s 1838 “Address Delivered before the Senior Class” at Harvard Divinity School asserts that “Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets,” Brodhead links Emerson’s notion of individuality to the prophetic logic of God inhabiting and moving through the self. Within Emerson’s work, Brodhead suggests, “Jesus’ claim to be the Christ or the Messiah was never meant to be exclusionary,” and the role of the spiritual leader is to be “a proud enjoyer of access to the divine who awakens others to their own comparable powers.” This view accounts for Emerson’s command to the divinity students to “cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity” (Brodhead, 22–3). Discover the divine within, in other words, and you will be well suited for ministering to others. Smith makes what Brodhead terms a “powerful gesture of literalization” in his treatment of prophecy – after all, he purported to “acquaint men at first hand” with actual holy texts – but The Book of Mormon nonetheless demonstrates the same kind of longing for prophetic privilege as Emerson’s “Address.” It is thus possible to read The Book of Mormon as an expression of desire for individual, unmediated contact with a divine source – a yearning not unlike that found in the emerging transcendentalist tradition.
Although Smith’s work lays claim to divine revelation, it often evinces interest in issues far more secular than those at play in Emerson’s Divinity School address. The Book of Mormon’s early books primarily engage questions regarding the status of Native Americans. Through Nephi’s revelations, European colonization and its effects become evidence of God’s plan for the region. “And it came to pass that I beheld the spirit of God, that it wrought upon other Gentiles,” Nephi writes, “and they went forth out of captivity, upon the many waters” (29). Neither trade routes nor international politics motivate the various colonial contingents. Rather, it is divine inspiration, as is what happens next. “I beheld the wrath of God,” Nephi explains, “that it was upon the seed of my brethren; and they were scattered before the Gentiles and were smitten” (29). Here, the violence that Europeans and Anglo-Americans enact upon indigenous Americans appears to be the fulfillment of a prophecy made thousands of years ago about a divine fiat that predates time itself. Within this interpretive framework, everything from Cortez’s destruction of the Aztecs, to the Pequot Wars, to Jackson-era policies of Indian removal seems not only justifiable but also unpreventable. God shows Nephi the wrath his brothers’ descendants will incur before Nephi has even built the ship that will carry them west, but for antebellum readers Smith’s narrative confirms colonial history. Prophecy makes it possible for Smith to present Native Americans as Milton’s Adam: always already destined to fall.
As many prophecies do, Nephi’s plates not only describe what has happened, but also predict what remains to come. Nephi declares that the Gentiles will eventually “carry [The Book of Mormon] forth unto the remnant of our seed. And then shall the remnant of our seed know concerning us, how that we came out from Jerusalem, and that they are descendants of the Jews” (117). The basic premise of Smith’s work did not shock many of his contemporaries. As Jared Farmer notes, “Theories about the Hebraic peopling of the Americas – the result of the wandering of the Lost Tribes or the Scattering of Babel – were prevalent and uncontroversial” in the 1830s (56). Indeed, while Campbell complained that Smith too carefully copied the style of the King James Bible, some critics lambasted The Book of Mormon for cribbing from this common theory of indigenous genealogy. But Smith’s work differed from others of the period, in that it posited a future in which Native Americans would assume their place as God’s chosen people and build the New Jerusalem for Christ’s return. “Joseph Smith reserved a paradoxical place for Indians,” Farmer writes, “They were cursed to be inferior yet promised to be superior” (57). In Smith’s words, “their scales of darkness shall begin to fall from their eyes; and many generations shall not pass away among them, save they shall be a white and delightsome people” (117). The ultimate future Nephi prophesizes, then, is one in which God will eliminate racial difference through revelation. The unfulfilled prophecy becomes as significant as those fulfilled within The Book of Mormon, because it allows antebellum readers to justify, even embrace, the status of the nation’s indigenous residents.
The Book of Mormon’s 1830 title page announces it to be proof of “the ETERNAL GOD manifesting Himself unto all nations.” From its outset, then, Smith’s book appears as a sacred artifact and a religious text. Despite its claims to universality and timeless divinity, however, The Book of Mormon is deeply concerned with one nation – the United States – and its narrative of an ostensibly sacred past resonates with nineteenth-century politics. Smith’s book does not merely invite readers to interpret American history through a biblical lens. Rather, it presents American history as a Bible. Drawing on the language of the King James Bible and the trope of prophecy, Smith offers a sacred account of the US landscape and places it within a divine teleology. That teleology, though, centers on the place of indigenous peoples within the United States and offers a justification for the continued subjugation of Native Americans. In this way, Smith’s text is arguably far more “secular” than Emerson’s Divinity School address. Divinity may become a function of the individual in Emerson’s work – “Obey thyself,” he writes, “That which shows God in me, fortifies me” (115) – but his 1838 lecture is nonetheless primarily concerned with spiritual fulfillment. “Faith makes us,” Emerson asserts, “and not we it” (126). Smith’s work, on the other hand, purports to be the word of God while also bearing a striking investment in the political and racial climates of the antebellum United States. Rather than standing as distinct cultural positions, then, the sacred and the secular merge in The Book of Mormon, as the US present becomes the product of a holy past, and the nation’s future appears to bear political as well as spiritual import.
Begetting and Believing: Du Bois’s Genealogy
“You misjudge us because you do not know us,” W.E.B. Du Bois asserts in “The Talented Tenth,” his contribution to Booker T. Washington’s 1903 work, The Negro Problem (34). In what follows, Du Bois offers white readers a kind of introduction to African Americans through brief descriptions of historical figures. Though his essay begins with an assertion that the “Negro race is going to be saved … by its exceptional men” (33), Du Bois’s list of remarkable people begins with a woman. “In the colonial days came Phillis Wheatley and Paul Cuffe,” he writes, “striving against the bars of prejudice” (36). What follows is essentially a timeline measured with individuals rather than dates:
Benjamin Banneker, the almanac maker … then came Dr. James Durham … and Lemuel Haynes … there was Ira Aldridge … there was that Voice crying in the Wilderness, David Walker … there was Purvis and Remond, Pennington and Highland Garnet, Sojourner Truth and Alexander Crummel, and above all Frederick Douglass. (36–40)
And the list goes on. “Who are to-day guiding the work of the Negro people?” Du Bois asks. His answer: “The ‘exceptions’ of course” (43). In making his case for education as the means of improving conditions for black Americans, Du Bois lists every renowned “exception” he can muster: “Langston, Bruce and Elliott, Greener, Williams, and Payne” (42). One after another, Du Bois’s examples form a train of resistance and triumph. Through his genealogy, readers encounter an American history that privileges the slave who asked Thomas Jefferson to keep his revolutionary promises over Jefferson himself. Such history, Du Bois argues, forms the roadmap for the future; as prominent individuals have led the way in the past, so will a new “aristocracy of talent and character” elevate an entire community and, indeed, nation (45).
Although Du Bois’s aim in “The Talented Tenth” is ostensibly secular – his plan for the advancement of black Americans is social and political, not necessarily spiritual – his genealogy has religious roots. In choosing Wheatley as his point of origin, Du Bois conjures African American literary history, to be sure, but he also evokes a theological tradition. The first African American woman to publish a volume of poetry, Wheatley actively engaged with the New England clergymen of her day, many of whom were abolitionists. For Wheatley, James Levernier reminds us, “politics and theology were inextricably intertwined” (23). Thus, Wheatley’s elegy to the itinerant minister George Whitefield presents religious conversion as a means of transcending racial difference. “Take him, ye Africans,” Wheatley’s speaker imagines Whitefield to say, “he longs for you, / Impartial Savior is his title due” (22, emphasis in original). The “he” in question is, of course, a Jesus who favors religious over racial identity. “Wash’d in the fountains of redeeming blood,” the poem asserts, “Ye shall be sons, and kings, and priests to God” (22). “Washing,” here, is baptism, something Wheatley presents as a means of transcending racial difference throughout her canon. Her perhaps most famous poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” concludes, “Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, / May be refin’d, and join th’angelic train” (17). With this, Wheatley both acknowledges and undercuts a common, racist interpretation of the biblical story of Cain and Abel, which configured blackness as divine retribution for the first fratricide. Playing on the homophones “Cain” and “cane,” the poem presents conversion as a lightening process similar to the refinement of sugar. Whiteness, then, becomes less a function of racial identification than of devotion to God. Adélékè Adéèkò has convincingly argued that religion offers Wheatley a means of critiquing slavery but “avoid[ing] maledictory tropes as she articulates her desires not in opposition to her masters but to untrue Christians” (2). As the point of origin for Du Bois’s genealogy, then, Wheatley inaugurates a history of African America in which the social realm is necessarily religious.
Christianity is not merely the starting point for Du Bois; it forms the backbone of his survey. This is particularly evident in its positioning of Walker as “that Voice crying in the Wilderness.” Du Bois’s characterization is actually a citation of a set of citations. Each of the New Testament gospels refers to John the Baptist, the figure who prefigures Jesus, as “the voice of one crying in the wilderness” (see Mark 1:3, Matt. 3:3, Luke 3:4, and John 1:23). This phrasing reiterates that of the Hebrew Bible’s book of Isaiah, which refers to “the voice of him that crieth in the wilderness,” calling believers to “make straight in the desert a highway for our God” (Isaiah 40:3). The repetition of Isaiah allows the gospels to fulfill the earlier book’s prophecy and in turn imbues the story of John the Baptist with prophetic significance. If John is the one of whom Isaiah speaks, then John’s own cry in the wilderness merits serious attention. In Du Bois’s text, then, Walker takes the form of a nineteenth-century prophet, but he predicts racial upheaval rather than religious revival. Du Bois reproduces a section of Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829), which demands of whites, “Is not God a God of justice to all his creatures … does not the blood of our fathers and of us, their children, cry aloud to the Lord of Sabaoth against you?” (Du Bois, 39). The voice that cries in this wilderness, then, is a harbinger of divine vengeance. Thus, although Du Bois’s essay positions Walker as Wheatley’s intellectual heir, it also positions him as one in a line of biblical types stretching back through the gospels to Isaiah. This is a historical trajectory Walker himself might have appreciated, since his own work combines sacred and profane history to assert that “the condition of the Israelites was better under the Egyptians than ours is under the whites” (12). For Walker as well as Du Bois, the history of African American resistance to slavery is as hallowed as it is literary.
In assembling his genealogy, Du Bois highlights the interplay between African American social justice movements and religious thought. He thus traces a historical line that is not necessarily bound up in the secularization narrative. But perhaps even more importantly, the genealogy itself – the very frame within which Du Bois situates his argument – has religious significance. Susan Griffin recently has reminded us that “the genealogy is, of course, deeply, typically biblical” (“Threshing” 454). The assumption that lineage matters, that there is interpretive payoff in knowing who came before, lies at the heart of Christian interpretations of the Hebrew Bible as well as the New Testament. Consider the opening verses of the Gospel of Matthew:
The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob … and Jesse begat David the king … and Jacob begat Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ. (Matt. 1:1–16)
Genealogy forges the link between Genesis and Jesus in Matthew’s account; the book tracks a history of bodies rather than events, and individuals form the nodes of a sacred timeline. No wonder Smith was so concerned with charting ancestry in The Book of Mormon – and no wonder Wieland focuses so heavily on the son’s inheritance of the father’s religious legacy. As Griffin notes, the discipline of literary studies, too, often takes genealogy for granted as a matrix of meaning. From Miller’s “From Edwards to Emerson,” to Brooks’s “From Edwards to Baldwin” – a genealogy in its own right – literary analyses (including my own) have configured history as a chronology of individuals. Griffin recommends not that we cease to think genealogically, but that we “become more conscious” of the assumptions buried in our reading practices (“Threshing” 454). This would make it possible also to see the religious forms and frames at work in seemingly secular texts. In tracing a line from Wheatley to Du Bois’s contemporaries, Du Bois does not merely highlight the long history of racial oppression and resistance in the United States – he also produces a narrative resonant with Christian significance. As Jesse begat David, so did Wheatley beget Douglass, and so will Du Bois and his contemporaries beget a new “talented tenth.”
The texts I have assembled may appear to have little in common; not only are they generically distinct, but also they serve different aesthetic and cultural aims. Wieland does not purport to be a sacred text any more than The Book of Mormon proposes a plan to improve the lives of African Americans. My goal, then, is not to trace out a genealogy of my own from Brown, via Smith, to Du Bois. Indeed, the chronological organization of this chapter is somewhat arbitrary, although I do wish to show that sequence need not translate into the kind of progress narrative at the heart of traditional accounts of secularization. Smith produced his oeuvre after Brown, but that fact alone does not make The Book of Mormon more (or, for that matter, less) “secular” than Wieland. For all of their differences, however, each of these texts in its own way highlights the perpetually shifting but always contingent relationship between the “religious” and the “secular.” Wieland is a gothic novel that collapses the distinction between empiricism and revelation. Smith’s text deploys familiar narrative techniques and tropes in outlining its sacred history. And Du Bois’s genealogy evokes a biblical interpretive frame in the service of a political argument. Read separately, these works call into question the distinction between religious and nonreligious modes of writing. Read in concert, they offer an opportunity to rethink critical narratives that position secularism as that which follows after religion and progressively eliminates it from US culture and its literary productions.
When considering the question of religion’s place in US literature, it is important to remember that “religion,” like “secularism,” is a signifier often left to stand for many things – experiences, beliefs, practices, institutions, and forms – some of which never announce themselves as “religious.” So while it may be true that certain veins of Anglo-American literature relinquish particular doctrinal claims over time, religion as such does not simply fall away from or make room for literature in the nineteenth-century United States. Neither, for that matter, does literature wholly turn away from religion. Indeed, the line between religion and literature, as discursive modes, is often murky at best. Even Hawthorne’s Custom-House narrator, so far removed from those New England Puritans, experiences “a sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat” when he holds the scarlet letter (43). When we stop expecting religion always to herald its own presence, we will be better equipped to recognize its impact on and relationship to literary productions. In a similar vein, when we stop expecting the secular to operate merely as the absence of religion, we will begin, in Fessenden’s words, “seeing secularism,” recognizing its contingencies, its pressures, and its function within narrative works (“The Secular” 634). The American literary landscape is not a space in which the religious and the nonreligious coexist; instead, it is a space in which the boundary between religion and secularism is continually contested, renegotiated, and reimagined.
References and Further Reading
Adéèkò, Adélékè. “Writing Africa under the Shadow of Slavery: Quaque, Wheatley, and Crowther.” Research in African Literatures 40.4 (2009): 1–24.
Anidjar, Gil. Semites: Race, Religion, Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.
Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Brodhead, Richard. “Prophets in America circa 1830: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nat Turner, and Joseph Smith.” In Joseph Smith, Jr.: Reappraisals after Two Centuries (pp. 13–30). Eds. Reid L. Neilsen and Terryl L. Givens. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Brooks, Joanna. “From Edwards to Baldwin: Heterodoxy, Discontinuity, and New Narratives of American Religious-literary History.” Early American Literature 45.2 (2010): 425–40.
Brown, Charles Brockden. Wieland, or the Transformation: An American Tale, and Other Stories. Ed. Caleb Crain. New York: The Modern Library, 2002.
Cady, Linell. “Secularism, Secularizing, and Secularization: Reflections on Stout’s Democracy and Tradition.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 73.3 (2005): 871–85.
Campbell, Alexander. Delusions: An Analysis of the Book of Mormon. Boston: Benjamin H. Greene, 1832.
Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Knopf, 1977.
Du Bois, W.E.B. “The Talented Tenth.” In The Negro Problem (pp. 31–76). Ed. Booker T. Washington. New York: James Pott & Co., 1903.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “An Address Delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge 1838.” In Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays (pp. 107–28). Ed. Larzer Ziff. New York: Penguin, 1982.
Farmer, Jared. On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
Fenton, Elizabeth. Religious Liberties: Anti-Catholicism and Liberal Democracy in Nineteenth-Century US Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Fessenden, Tracy. Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Fessenden, Tracy. “ ‘The Secular’ as Opposed to What?” New Literary History 38.4 (2007): 631–6.
Franchot, Jenny. Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Gauchet, Marcel. The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion. Trans. Oscar Burge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Griffin, Susan. Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Griffin, Susan. “Threshing Floors: A Response to Joanna Brooks.” American Literary History 22.2 (2010): 454–8.
Gutjahr, Paul. “The Golden Bible in the Bible’s Golden Age: The Book of Mormon and Antebellum Print Culture.” American Transcendental Quarterly 12.4 (1998): 275–93.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Ed. Ross C. Murfin. Boston: Bedford St. Martin’s, 1991.
Kafer, Peter. Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
Kaufmann, Michael. “The Religious, the Secular, and Literary Studies: Rethinking the Secularization Narrative in Histories of the Profession.” New Literary History 38.4 (2007): 607–28.
Kiser, Michael. “Emersonian Terrorism: John Brown, Islam, and Postsecular Violence.” American Literature 82.2 (2010): 333–60.
Levernier, James. “Phillis Wheatley and the New England Clergy.” Early American Literature 26.1 (1991): 21–38.
Matthiessen, F.O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941.
Miller, Perry. “From Edwards to Emerson.” In Errand into the Wilderness (pp. 184–203). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956.
Neilsen, Reid L., and Terryl L. Givens. Joseph Smith, Jr.: Reappraisals after Two Centuries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Pease, Donald. “Introduction.” In The American Renaissance Reconsidered (pp. vii–ix). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.
Pecora, Vincent. Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006.
Ricoeur, Paul. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Literature, and Imagination. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1995.
Smith, Joseph, Jr. The Book of Mormon: An Account Written by the Hand of Mormon, upon Plates Taken from the Plates of Nephi. Palmyra, NY: E.B. Grandin, 1830.
Southerton, Simon G. Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church. Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2004.
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Walker, David. Appeal, in Four Articles, Along with a Preamble, to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular and Very Expressly to Those in the United States. 3rd ed. Boston: David Walker, 1830.
Wheatley, Phillis. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Denver, CO: W.H. Lawrence, 1887.