Sandra M. Gustafson
Early American literature offers a broad spectrum of religious perspectives and genres shaped by the dynamic environment of North America, from the pre‐Columbian period, through the age of European discovery and contending empires, to the era of revolution and nation building. Religious belief – and religiously motivated conflict – were central elements in the lives of many people, and much of the verbal art reflects a sacred worldview or engages with metaphysical views. A religious perspective informs the creation tales and ritual songs developed by Indigenous communities, and religion shapes European‐American genres including sermons, conversion narratives, ethnographies, life writings, early novels, and a range of poetic forms. Savvy readers may note that the title of this essay echoes William James’s influential book, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902). James’s focus on the varieties of religious experience – rather than theology or doctrine – offers a loose guide to literary historians interested in this kaleidoscopic history of belief, form, and expression.
The most familiar strand in the complex weave of this history is the narrative of Puritan origins. The works of poetry and prose written in the early years at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay – works such as William Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation (c. 1630–1650), John Winthrop’s Model of Christian Charity (1630), and the poems of Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor – are among the best‐known writings of the early colonial period. These writings from colonial New England attracted fresh attention in the nineteenth century, contributing to the shape of American literary culture. New England‐based writers including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Margaret Fuller responded to the international currents of literary Romanticism with, in part, an exploration of Puritan origins. Scholars have crafted a narrative of national literary origins by connecting the works of the New England writers to the Puritan past via the prose style of another New England native, the Reformed (that is, Calvinist) theologian Jonathan Edwards.
The connections between the faith‐based writings of the colonial period and the imaginative writings of the nineteenth century were influentially drawn in the essay “From Edwards to Emerson” (1940) by the eminent Puritan scholar Perry Miller. Edwards, the great modernizer of Calvinism, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Unitarian minister turned Transcendentalist sage, were both Massachusetts natives and men of the cloth, and they wrote mainly in prose. Yet in other ways, the links between Edwards and Emerson are far from obvious. They were separated by a full century – Edwards began his rise to prominence in the early 1730s, while Emerson published his first great essay, Nature, in 1836 – and it was a century divided by the American Revolution. Edwards wrote mainly sermons and dense theological treatises, while Emerson shifted from sermons to literary essays and poetry. In Miller’s essay, which initially appeared in the journal The New England Quarterly, he posited an “inherent mysticism” and “ingrained pantheism” in Puritan thought that he found distilled in Edwards’s prose style (1956: 197). Emerson later absorbed these qualities and rearticulated them in a more secular idiom. Casting aside theological scaffolding, Miller wrote, Emerson became “free to celebrate purely and simply the presence of God in the soul and in nature, the pure metaphysical essence of the New England tradition” (198).
Eager for an organizing narrative of American literary history, scholars responded energetically – though not uncritically – to Miller’s essay. Miller later complained that his argument had been widely misconstrued. When he republished “From Edwards to Emerson” in the collection Errand into the Wilderness (1956), he added a headnote stating that he had not intended to claim “a direct line of intellectual descent” (184) from the Calvinist theologian to the literary essayist. “In a strictly historical regard,” Miller emphasized in this new note, “there is no organic evolution of ideas from Edwards to Emerson” (184). The lines of continuity that Miller found between these two sons of New England, who differed in their theology as in so much else, involved their common stance as writers and the stylistic choices that it entailed. Miller described this stance as derived from “the Puritan’s effort to confront, face to face, the image of a blinding divinity in the physical universe, and to look upon that universe without the intermediacy of ritual, of ceremony, of the Mass and the confessional” (185). In short, Miller framed the tradition of American literature as the extension of spiritual immediacy by other means.
Miller’s focus on Puritan experientialism in this passage glosses over the authoritative role that New England ministers played in the colonies following the Antinomian Controversy of 1636–1638. This period of religious and political conflict in the fledgling colony at Massachusetts Bay pitted advocates of free grace, including the Reverend John Cotton and his parishioner Anne Hutchinson, against the majority of the colony’s ministers, who emphasized the important mediating role of the clergy. Miller’s narrative likewise ignores the persecution of Quaker heirs to the experientially based religious style that Anne Hutchinson and her associates had embraced, notably including Hutchinson’s friend Mary Dyer, who converted to Quakerism and was hanged by the Bay Colony government in 1660. Further, Miller’s characterization understates the established place that the Congregationalist system of self‐governing local churches held in New England until well after the Revolution. Rather than reject “intermediacy,” Massachusetts became the last state in the Union to sever formal ties to a church, which it did only in 1833, shortly before Emerson launched his literary career, at a time of expanding immigration of Roman Catholics from Ireland and Germany.
At the heart of Miller’s omissions is his casual dismissal of “the Mass and the confessional,” which accurately captures a durable strain of anti‐Catholic rhetoric that is frequently present in Puritan writings and that has had a long afterlife in American culture (Fenton 2011; Fessenden 2007). Persistent rivals with Great Britain for control of the continent, France and Spain held large swathes of North American territory well into the nineteenth century. Catholic missionaries from those countries reshaped the religious lives of Indigenous communities, as portrayed in the Jesuit Relations (1632–1673) and other writings from New France and New Spain. The product of these religious and political rivalries, anti‐Catholic rhetoric of the early colonial period often evokes the biblical figures of the Antichrist and the Whore of Babylon. Later versions of this rhetoric reflect the influence of Enlightenment thought, contrasting Catholic hierarchy with Protestant egalitarianism, or Catholic obscurity with Protestant transparency, or Catholic emotionalism with Protestant rationality. While the number of Catholics in the British colonies and the early United States was small, the Catholic presence increased rapidly as a consequence of immigration and the nation’s territorial expansion into regions once claimed by the European Catholic powers.
In Miller’s day, Roman Catholics were staking out a larger place in the history and culture of the United States. This effort met with resistance, as it had from the nation’s founding. A dozen years before Miller’s essay appeared, Al Smith’s presidential run gave heightened visibility to the expanded Catholic population and generated backlash from the Ku Klux Klan. Among Miller’s contemporaries were Catholic intellectuals who argued that the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas had played a role in the American founding (McGreevy 2003: 193). It is worth remembering this context for Miller’s essay. American anti‐Catholicism, rooted in the imperial rivalries between Protestant Britain and Catholic France and Spain, has lingered in a twilight afterlife of unexamined assumptions about prose style, even as it has faded as a social phenomenon. Miller’s rejection of “the Mass and the confessional” pushes back against efforts to establish a connection between the national founding and the Catholic intellectual tradition, while his description of a single thread of direct mystical encounter with the universe running through American literature forecloses numerous possibilities involving ritual and ceremony.
An alternative reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s works shows that he did not so much reject ritual and ceremony as seek to transform how they were understood. Five years after Massachusetts became the final state to disestablish religion, and in the midst of a wave of Catholic immigration from Ireland and the violent reaction that it produced, Emerson posed a bold challenge to the Divinity School faculty at Harvard University. He had trained as a Unitarian (a form of liberal Protestantism that believed in a unitary God and taught the subordinate position of Christ) at the Harvard Divinity School, but he had come to find this form of liberal Protestantism too confining, even referring to it as “corpse‐cold Unitarianism” (Miller 1956: 199). His 1838 address at his alma mater presented his prescription for imaginative and spiritual renewal when he urged his audience to “let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the forms already existing. For, if once you are alive, you shall find they shall become plastic and new” (1983: 91). His goal was not to reject forms – even Roman Catholic forms – but to reanimate them with a new spirit, and he promised that “one pulsation of virtue can uplift and vivify” what he termed “a whole popedom of forms” (81).
It is possible, then, to turn Miller’s claim about the connection between Edwards and Emerson on its head and see Emerson’s translation of forms in “The Divinity School Address” (1838) not as a continuation of a sensibility rooted in the effort to “look upon that universe without the intermediacy of ritual, of ceremony, of the Mass and the confessional,” but rather as a rebuttal of the Puritan tradition of Calvinist exclusivity that had descended through Edwards. Considered as a call to embrace religious disestablishment and tolerance, Emerson’s address enables a more capacious understanding of the religious imagination and its role in American literature. It represents a deepening commitment to the free exercise of religion and offers an appreciation for the imaginative power that such freedom could unleash. Religious freedom and imaginative liberty, Emerson suggests, can operate through symbolic forms and even rituals, if they are allowed to develop organically.
The role of “the intermediacy of ritual [and] ceremony” in American literature, and the relationship of ritual and ceremony to aesthetics, offer potentially fruitful avenues toward a more comprehensive history of religion and literature in America before 1820. Elements of the ritual and ceremony that characterized Catholic styles of worship were retained by the Church of England, which was the established church in many colonies. Rejected by the Separatists at Plymouth, and accommodated by the non‐separating Congregationalists of the Bay Colony, the Anglican Church later came to symbolize a longed‐for connection to tradition. Some of Emerson’s literary contemporaries turned to the rich ceremonial practices of the Catholic and Anglican churches to add texture and vividness to their works. Lydia Maria Child portrayed the sensuousness and aesthetic appeal of the Anglican prayer book in Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times (1824). Nathaniel Hawthorne put the tension between Puritan plain style and an aesthetic richness associated with Anglicanism and Catholicism at the heart of many of his works. The Madonna‐like beauty of Hester Prynne, the heroine of The Scarlet Letter (1850), exemplifies this tension, as does her rich embroidery, which embellishes not only her scarlet A and her daughter Pearl’s clothing, but also the attire of the Bay Colony’s clergy and governing class.
A focus on ritual likewise provides an essential context for Native American verbal arts. A variety of traditions – Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) condolence rituals, Navajo healing chants, and songs of Ojibwe medicine societies recorded on birch bark scrolls, to cite a few – are bound up with ritual practices. An emphasis on ritual context establishes a point of relation between these spiritual traditions and certain forms of Christian worship. Ritual and ceremony contributed to the success of Catholic missionary efforts, permitting syncretic or hybrid formations, a process that registers in the Jesuit Relations and other mission‐related writings. These parallels were explored by various authors including Child, who portrays the aesthetic attractions of both Indigenous and Anglican ritualism in Hobomok and later wrote a comparative study of world religions. Similar considerations are involved in early African American writings, which commonly reflect syncretic elements of the Great Awakening.
The rejection of ritual and ceremony has dramatic qualities of its own. The Quakers, who espoused the plainest of plain styles, employed distinctive forms of dress, language, and worship designed to set them apart from their non‐Quaker neighbors. These protocols amounted to a ritualized form of anti‐ritualism that contributed an important strand to the literature of the period. The Quaker understanding of the deity within prompted Elizabeth Ashbridge and John Woolman to craft vibrant spiritual narratives. It also informed Charles Brockden Brown’s dark view of inspiration, whose proximity to madness he explored in his Gothic novel Wieland; or The Transformation: An American Tale (1798).
The capacious approach to religion and literature that I am presenting has two central elements, one more historical and the other more literary. The historical element involves attention to the complex histories of religious affiliation, including the conflict and violence borne of competing religious identities, along with a focus on the emergence of religious freedom as an ideal. The literary element involves consideration of religious occasions as opportunities for verbal artistry, accompanied by an exploration of the ways that religious beliefs and practices are bound up with aesthetic concerns as they help shape representational and stylistic choices.
A first step toward a more expansive history of religion’s place in American literature involves a clear‐eyed view of the presence of both religious pluralism and religious conflict in the colonies and early republic. Despite the Puritans’ reputation as seekers of religious freedom, there was no straight line from the Bay colony’s founding to the acceptance of liberty of conscience and the expansive spiritual and literary imagination that Emerson promoted. Over the course of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, contests over freedom of religion and toleration had occurred in many of Britain’s North American colonies. The principle of the separation of church and state had been asserted and contested in the colonies almost from their foundation. Its best‐known exponent, the dissenting clergyman Roger Williams, gave notable voice to the idea of the supremacy of individual conscience in statements that led to his banishment from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635. Williams went on to write the first sustained treatment of the subject in The Bloudy Tenent, of Persecution, for cause of Conscience, Discussed, in A Conference betweene Truth and Peace (1644), and he applied its principles in the colony of Rhode Island, which was granted a charter that same year.
Colonial Quakers were vulnerable to persecution, and they were among the most vocal champions of religious liberty. Quakerism emerged in sometimes sharp opposition to Puritan belief and practice. Rejecting Calvinist predestinarianism – that is, the belief that God preordained which souls were saved and which were damned – the Quaker movement cohered in the north of England in 1652 as an egalitarian challenger to the Puritan regime of Oliver Cromwell. It rapidly developed into an international phenomenon, with ties to pietist groups (that is, groups oriented toward personal religious experience) on the European continent; it also had an early presence in the Caribbean and the North American colonies. The clearest instance of the limits of Puritan toleration involves the four Quakers, Mary Dyer among them, who were executed in Boston around 1660 for publicly expressing their views. Their treatment drew sharp criticism from Charles II, who sympathized with both Quakers and Catholics as religious outsiders. The king’s letter condemning the executions had a moderating effect on the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but it did not overturn the existing Congregationalist order. Around the same time, Quakers in New Amsterdam (later New York) expressed their demand for religious freedom in the Flushing Remonstrance of 1657. The Quaker leader William Penn furthered that cause in The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience Once More Debated & Defended (1670), where he articulated the principles that he followed when he established Pennsylvania as a “holy experiment” in 1681.
Rhode Island and Pennsylvania were not the first colonies to experiment with religious toleration. Founded by converts to Roman Catholicism in 1632, Maryland adopted a policy of religious neutrality, a stance that was repeatedly challenged by Protestant dissenters. Responding to these challenges, the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649 guaranteed religious liberty to all people. It was the first law of its type in the British empire. After a change in the colony’s charter, however, the Church of England became Maryland’s established church in 1701.
At the time of the Revolution, five colonies were officially Anglican, three had established Congregationalist churches, and the remaining five had no state church. The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States prohibited religious establishment, that is, the creation of an official church with the power to claim the nation’s allegiance and secure its financial support, such as the Anglican Church had become under Henry VIII. Following the adoption of the Bill of Rights in 1791, the federal government was prohibited by the First Amendment from creating an established church. Over the succeeding decades, the eight American states that had inherited church establishments from the colonial period gradually embraced the principle of the separation of church and state, with Massachusetts bringing up the rear.
An 1833 amendment to the Massachusetts constitution ended the ability of Congregational churches to tax residents, in effect repealing a 1692 law that supported a town‐based Congregational system. A history of the law of 1692 gives a sense of the persistent conflict over the place of official religion in the Bay colony (Cushing 1969). The law restricted religious protections that had been included in the new royal charter issued to the colony in 1691, which promised liberty of conscience “for all Christians (except Papists [that is, Roman Catholics]).” Passed in the year of the Salem witchcraft trials – a social crisis that many scholars have connected to fears of lost political autonomy – the law mandated a town‐based system of Congregational churches to be funded by residents, reinforcing the existence of a decentralized yet state‐mandated church. From 1692 to 1833, a series of legislated measures and lawsuits sought a modus vivendi between the Congregationalist hegemony in Massachusetts (which had its own internal differences) and proliferating groups of dissenters and other religious minorities, including Quakers, Methodists, Baptists, and, after 1820, growing numbers of Catholic immigrants. The shift toward religious toleration that culminated in the 1833 amendment was a source of sometimes brutal conflict, which the amendment did not end. The Ursuline convent at Charlestown was burned in anti‐Catholic rioting the year after it passed.
This protracted coming‐to‐terms with religious pluralism can be tracked in the Revolutionary‐era writings of two natives of Massachusetts, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. Adams was the more devout of the two men, and his writings reflect the challenges posed by his encounters with other faiths. Descended from Congregationalists, Adams and his wife Abigail were active members of a congregation that had moved to embrace Unitarianism. Several of John’s letters to Abigail provide a window into the mind of a latter‐day Puritan grappling with the religious transformations that were unfolding around him, as Protestant theology became more liberal and as Britain’s colonies sought a union across religious divides. Finding the means to reconcile divergent approaches to religious authority was among the most difficult problems facing the patriot movement, and Adams captured what that process felt like to a man rooted in his home colony’s history and traditions. In comparison, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography presents the transition with greater equanimity, a stance born out of his temporal and psychological distance from his native Boston. In the third section of the Autobiography, which Franklin wrote in late 1788 or early 1789, he includes an account of the Assembly Hall that had been constructed to house the crowds drawn to hear the evangelical preaching of the English Anglican minister George Whitefield (1714–1770). Franklin’s description captures the practical meaning of religious pluralism in his adopted home city of Philadelphia as the United States prepared to implement its new Constitution, helping to set the stage for the First Amendment.
Adams’s letters convey the volatility surrounding religious difference at the moment when colonial leaders explored the possibility of uniting against British authority. On 16 September 1774, as the First Continental Congress assembled in Philadelphia, John wrote to Abigail about the role that religion was coming to play in that body (Adams 2017). He described how at the first meeting of the Congress, Thomas Cushing, his colleague in the Massachusetts delegation, “made a Motion, that it should be opened with Prayer.” This motion was rebuffed by John Jay and John Rutledge, delegates from New York and South Carolina respectively, who argued that “we were so divided in religious Sentiments, some Episcopalians [i.e. Anglicans], some Quakers, some Aanabaptists [sic], some Presbyterians and some Congregationalists, […] that We could not join in the same Act of Worship.” Samuel Adams, John’s cousin and a Massachusetts delegate, responded that “he was no Bigot, and could hear a Prayer from a Gentleman of Piety and Virtue, who was at the same Time a Friend to his Country.” The representatives at the Congress agreed to invite the Reverend Jacob Duché, the Rector of the Anglican congregation at Christ Church in Philadelphia, to offer the opening prayer.
Duché came to deliver the benediction the morning after news arrived that the British had bombed Boston. Describing the scene, Adams emphasized Duché’s High Church accoutrements and forms of worship, followed by his reading of scripture: “He appeared with his Clerk and in his Pontificallibus, and read several Prayers, in the established Form; and then read the Collect for the seventh day of September, which was the Thirty fifth Psalm.” Adams described the electric effect when Duché read the day’s psalm, which begins “Plead my cause, O LORD, with them that strive with me: fight against them that fight against me.” “I never saw a greater Effect upon an Audience,” John wrote to Abigail. “It seemed as if Heaven had ordained that Psalm to be read on that Morning.” Adams described the psalm as a “Sortes biblicae,” that is, a passage which related to the circumstances in a manner that suggested divine agency was behind the events at Boston.
As Duché continued, he made an unexpected shift from “formal” prayer to “extemporary Prayer, which filled the Bosom of every Man present.” This shift amplified Adams’s sense of the spiritual meaning of these events. In the Reformed Protestant tradition, the ability to pray without a text, rather than from a prayer book such as the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, signified a minister’s attunement to God. This understanding had deepened during the Great Awakening, as extempore prayer came to signal an authentic spiritual relation. Adams noted that Duché’s prayer compared favorably with those of the Reverend Samuel Cooper, the pastor of the liberalizing Brattle Street Church, which Adams attended when he was in Boston:
I must confess I never heard a better Prayer or one, so well pronounced. Episcopalian as he [that is, Duché] is, Dr. Cooper himself never prayed with such fervour, such Ardor, such Earnestness and Pathos, and in Language so elegant and sublime – for America, for the Congress, for The Province of Massachusetts Bay, and especially the Town of Boston. It has had an excellent Effect upon every Body here.
Adams’s emphasis on Duché’s “elegant and sublime” language, with its echo of Edmund Burke’s treatise on the ideas of the sublime and beautiful, speaks to the role of aesthetics in the successful negotiation of religious differences that enabled the embattled colonies to unite. The willingness of a prominent Anglican clergyman to support Boston – and his striking ability to excel at the “extemporary” style of prayer practiced by the descendants of the Puritans – portended a hopeful outcome to religiously minded patriots like John Adams.1
There is an undercurrent in Adams’s letter associating the patriot movement with Reformed styles of worship, and this element in his thought points to the lasting impact of religious differences on American literature and culture. His letter illustrates the fact that printed texts and extempore expression existed as religiously inflected semiotic modes; that is, they functioned as a system of signs invested with certain meanings that verbal forms came to have in post‐Reformation religious conflict (Gustafson 2000: xvi–xvii). When Adams praises Duché’s reading of Psalm 35 as a providential act, he speaks in the tradition of sola scriptura, a Christian theological doctrine associated with Protestantism, especially Puritanism, which holds the Christian Bible to be the exclusive provenance of authentic faith and religious practice. His subsequent praise for Duché’s skill at “extemporary” prayer illustrates how a strict reliance on the Bible was coupled with unscripted individual expression. In Adams’s account, the mediating apparatus of an ecclesiastical hierarchy drops away as Duché proceeds, and the “elegant and sublime” language that he utters has the unifying force of a spirit at once holy and patriotic – and, importantly for Adams, focused on Boston.
The Roman Catholic mass represented an intensified version of the formal elements that Adams noted in Duché’s initial appearance and opening prayers. Adams’s views of Catholicism are apparent in a letter of 9 October 1774, where he described the Roman Catholic Latin mass to Abigail in vivid detail, summing up with the statement that the mass involved “every Thing which can lay hold of the Eye, Ear, and Imagination – Every Thing which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant.” His emphasis on the material and sensual elements of the mass contrast with the focus on language in his account of Duché’s prayer, where spirit‐infused verbal expression transcends the physical accoutrements of the Anglican service. The fact that the Catholic mass was conducted in Latin – a “dead” language, inaccessible to many parishioners – amplified its “bewitch[ing]” effect. This language of enchantment resonates with Enlightenment views of Catholic traditionalism as a form of mystification.
Adams’s stereotype of Catholicism was put to the test when he became politically involved with members of a prominent Maryland family, the Carrolls. Charles Carroll of Carrollton, who later signed the Declaration of Independence, and his cousin John Carroll served on a delegation to Canada that Adams described in a letter to Abigail of 18 February 1776. Adams noted that Charles Carroll had been “educated in some University in France,” and characterized him as a man “of great Abilities and Learning, compleat Master of French Language and a Professor of the Roman catholic Religion, yet a warm, a firm, a zealous Supporter of the Rights of America, in whose Cause he has hazarded his all.” The “great Abilities and Learning” that Adams discovered in Charles Carroll contrast with his earlier disparagement of the Catholic mass. In the 1774 letter Adams employed conventions that highlight the mass’s material attractions and imaginative appeal, not as a rich tradition or a satisfying communal practice, but rather as evidence of the Church’s power to manipulate and oppress its members. Adams noted as well that John Carroll was asked to join the delegation as “a Roman Catholic Priest and a Jesuit” because supporters of the independence movement in Canada were being denied baptism and absolution. Further, John cautioned Abigail against sharing the information about John Carroll’s presence on the delegation with anyone who might become suspicious of a Jesuit participating in the mission. His remarks provide a window into the religious prejudices of their circle.
While John Adams considered the ceremonial practices of Anglicans and Catholics with some degree of suspicion, Benjamin Franklin offered a more relaxed view of religious pluralism. Franklin’s encounters with religions other than his inherited Congregational faith began earlier than Adams’s and led him to view the American republic as a place of religious inclusion. His autobiography opens with a family history that stresses an early and committed Protestantism involving the possession of an English Bible. The focus on literacy associated with Bible ownership carries into Franklin’s description of his own intellectual development, which similarly revolves around reading and writing but emphasizing literature rather than scripture. In the famous scene of his arrival in Philadelphia, Franklin seeks shelter in a Quaker meetinghouse and promptly falls asleep. It is a turn of events that anticipates his increasingly skeptical view of religion. This skepticism mounts as a result of his exposure to the religious views of Samuel Keimer, his eccentric first employer. It flourishes during his training as a printer in London, culminating in his publication of a skeptical pamphlet, A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain (1725). Around this time Franklin paid a visit to an elderly Roman Catholic woman, whose charitable habits, confession of vain thoughts, and abstemious mode of living bear a striking resemblance to Franklin’s later concern with what he terms “the Art of Virtue.” Good works, espoused by Catholics as a means to salvation but rejected by Calvinists, proved central to Franklin’s understanding of civic virtue.
Franklin’s ecumenical and interfaith views were strengthened by the arrival of the Reverend George Whitefield at Philadelphia in 1739. Whitefield’s ability to draw “Multitudes of all Sects and Denominations” and “the extraordinary Influence of his Oratory on his Hearers” (Franklin 2004: 88) were especially striking. Excluded from many pulpits, Whitefield often had to preach outdoors. Finally, a public collection was made to build a large hall that accommodated “any Preacher of any religious Persuasion who might desire to say something to the People of Philadelphia” (88). Franklin explains that “the Design in building” was not “to accommodate any particular Sect, but the Inhabitants in general, so that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a Missionary to preach Mahometanism to us, he would find a Pulpit at his Service” (88). The hall was supervised by a multi‐faith committee of trustees, until it fell into disuse around 1750. At that point, the non‐sectarian Franklin persuaded his fellow trustees to donate the building to the Academy (later the University of Pennsylvania). Readers of the Autobiography have long noted how Franklin’s openness to all faiths and distance from any particular religious commitment leads to a focus on the contributions that religion makes to morality and the public good. These themes contribute to a view of religious freedom as a foundational element of the American republic.
Indigenous religious practices across North America varied greatly and changed over time, as traditional creation tales, rituals accompanied by song, and other forms of sacred orature (that is, oral literature) persisted and evolved. After the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the West Indies, Europeans produced written records of these oral arts in promotional narratives, histories, and ethnographic texts. Other writings focused on the myriad paths to Christianity. One of those paths is captured in the life story of Catherine (or Kateri) Tekakwitha, who in 2012 became the first Indigenous American to be sanctified by the Roman Catholic Church (Shoemaker 1995; Greer 2005). Tekakwitha’s story appears in a number of manuscript and printed works produced by French Jesuits between 1680 and 1744. Born in what is now central New York State, in the Mohawk village of Ossernenon, Tekakwitha was 19 when she converted to Catholicism and moved to Kahnawake, a native village attached to the Jesuit mission near Montreal. There her asceticism and piety attracted notice from both priests and laypeople. Not long after her death in 1680, when she was 24, the Jesuits Pierre Cholenec and Claude Chauchetière wrote narratives of her life that circulated in manuscript, and a revised version of Cholenec’s account was printed in 1715. Cholenec and Chauchetière followed the conventions of colonial hagiography, lifting Catherine out of her immediate context and portraying her as an embodiment of Christian virtue, even as they broke ground by adapting what to that point had been a genre centered on Europeans. Pious Indians had featured in previous instances of colonial hagiography, such as the Huron converts in writings about the life of Father Isaac Jogues (1607–1646), who was himself canonized in 1930. Tekakwitha was the first Native American to occupy the central role in a hagiographic narrative from North America.
Stories of her sanctity circulated orally as well, which is probably how they first reached English colonists. Allan Greer, Tekakwitha’s modern biographer, notes a passage that refers to “Saint Katherine” (2005: 148) in a manuscript narrative by Joseph Kellogg, a captive from Deerfield, Massachusetts who was taken to Kahnawake in the early 1700s. The first English‐language version of her life to appear in print may have been the one that the Jesuit historian P.F.X. Charlevoix included in his popular work of 1744, the Histoire et description generale de la Nouvelle France, which a Paris press issued in both French and English versions. Charlevoix’s narrative served as the basis for François‐René de Chateaubriand’s depiction of Tekakwitha in Les Natchez, a Romantic epic in prose begun around 1794 and published in Paris some three decades later. An English translation of Les Natchez appeared in London in 1827. The reach and influence of the Jesuit Relations and associated texts within the English‐speaking world remains to be explored.
For the period that is the central focus of this essay, spanning from the Great Awakening to 1820, the most notable developments in the religious expression of Indigenous Americans include the emergence of two predominant strains: the syncretic and the revitalizationist. The first strain involves syncretic or hybrid formations of Christianity, a style of religious expression that is central to the writings of Native American intellectuals such as Samson Occom and Hendrick Aupaumut. The second strain involves revitalized or traditionalist practices, articulated by such spiritual leaders as Handsome Lake and Tenskwatawa, and given political form by Sagoyewatha and Tecumseh. These practices were based on the belief that Indigenous societies should remain autonomous and that they should keep their religions as distinct from Christianity as possible. Neither strain amounted to an assimilationist stance, while both contained elements that resonated with Christian theology.
Occom and Aupaumut had close connections with Reformed ministers influenced by the Great Awakening and committed to Native literacy as an aspect of religious conversion. In later life, these Native leaders wrote in several well‐established genres. Occom’s most famous work, A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul (1772), went through numerous editions and was translated into several languages, while his hymnal containing some original compositions alongside older works, A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1774), achieved more limited but still notable success with both Indian and white audiences. He left a number of works in manuscript, including a narrative of his life, an ethnographic account of the Montauk Indians on Long Island, and his journals (Brooks 2006). Several of Aupaumut’s speeches and letters were printed during his lifetime, while his diplomatic narrative of negotiations with the western tribes on behalf of the Washington administration and his auto‐ethnography of the Mahicans remained in manuscript until after his death (Gustafson 2000: 257–264; Wyss 2003: 105–122). These genres – speeches, sermons, letters, hymns, life narratives, diaries, ethnographic and travel narratives – are staples of early American literature. The works by Occom and Aupaumut are distinguished by their point of view and subject matter and sometimes by the choice of imagery alluding to aspects of Native life or Indigenous traditions.
While Occom and Aupaumut authored their own texts, the words of the Seneca leaders Handsome Lake and Sagoyewatha and the Shawnee leaders Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh have been preserved in mediated forms. Around 1799, Handsome Lake developed a moral code based on dream visions, which he circulated orally. This code became the basis for a religion that Arthur C. Parker described in The Code of Handsome Lake, Seneca Prophet (1913) and that continues to be practiced today (Wallace 1969). Influenced in some measure by Handsome Lake, Sagoyewatha gave a speech in 1805 urging the Reverend Jacob Cram to devote his missionary efforts to white communities and leave the Haudenosaunee to pursue their own religious path. This speech, the most famous of Sagoyewatha’s works, was transcribed and repeatedly printed (Ganter 2006). While Handsome Lake was most concerned to provide spiritual guidance for the Iroquois, Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh had a broader goal: they were centrally involved in the rise of the Pan‐Indian resistance movement that opposed US expansion in the Midwest. Like Handsome Lake, Tenskwatawa experienced visions that invested him with spiritual authority. He provided religious leadership that bolstered his brother Tecumseh’s military opposition to the American army, until Tecumseh died fighting on the British side at the Battle of Thames in 1813. Tenskwatawa lived on until 1836. Fascinating figures to many white readers, Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh appeared in numerous literary and para‐literary works which include their words, or words attributed to them (Sayre 2005: 268–302).
The Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s that influenced Samson Occom and Hendrik Aupaumut likewise created the cultural framework for the emergence of the first major African American writers, including John Marrant and Phillis Wheatley. The Awakening shifted the balance between written and oral expression in Protestant preaching, in no small part due to the verbal talents of George Whitefield, whose theatrical style led one modern historian to characterize him as a “divine dramatist” (Stout 1991). Extempore preaching, as well as other modes of unscripted or impromptu expression, emerged as signatures of the evangelical New Light movement. The immediacy and dramatic power associated with this less textually constrained style contributed to the revivalists’ success with Native Americans and African Americans.
Whitefield’s final visits to the colonies prior to his death in 1770 provided the occasion for Marrant’s conversion narrative and launched Wheatley’s writing career. A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black (1785) focuses on Marrant’s conversion by Whitefield 15 years earlier and his ensuing adventures. Marrant (1755–1791) was a free black youth training to be a musician in Charleston, South Carolina, when he overheard Whitefield preaching. Struck down by the power of the spirit, Marrant recovered his health after a visit from a minister, but he remained uneasy living with his unconverted family. His sense of spiritual isolation led him to go “over the fence” into the wilderness, where he ate grass and slept in trees (16). After a time, he was taken up by a Cherokee hunter and eventually led to the man’s village. There, threatened with execution, he succeeded in converting the daughter of the “king” and her father, with dramatic consequences: “A great change took place among the people; the king’s house became God’s house; the soldiers were ordered away, and the poor condemned prisoner had perfect liberty, and was treated like a prince” (28). He was “dressed much like the king,” who adorned him in “golden ornaments,” and he “learnt to speak their tongue in the highest stile” (28).
Marrant’s story was transcribed and edited by the Reverend William Aldridge, a member of the evangelical Methodist network known as the Huntingdon Connexion that was based in England, where Marrant trained for the ministry. He was later sent to Nova Scotia, where he preached to black loyalists as well as Micmac Indians and white congregations. He published a journal of these experiences, and also a sermon from 1789 that he delivered at Prince Hall’s Masonic lodge in Boston. His collaboration with Aldridge produced a narrative that was an enduring popular literary success: by 1835 it had been printed at least 21 times, attracting readers on both sides of the Atlantic. This success was likely due to the narrative’s intertwined elements of spiritual and physical captivity, which reverberate with themes from conversion and Indian captivity narratives and look ahead to the emerging genre of the slave narrative.
While Marrant witnessed slavery but was not himself a slave, Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753–1784) did experience enslavement. References to her capture in West Africa as a young child and the imagined sufferings of her parents contribute moving elements to a handful of her poems. Susanna and John Wheatley, the Boston couple who purchased the girl, recognized her remarkable intellect and provided an extraordinary education that included training in the classics and wide reading in English poetry. Wheatley’s own developing capacities as a poet first attracted public attention when her elegy on the death of George Whitefield was published as a broadside in 1770. This celebration of Whitefield’s “strains of eloquence refined” that could “inflame the heart, and captivate the mind” (Wheatley 2001: 15) evoked the theme of spiritual captivity as a necessary stage on the way to true liberty. The poem’s central stanza offers a compressed version of Whitefield’s core message, presented as his own words, which concludes: “Take Him, ye Africans, He longs for you […]. You shall be sons, and kings, and priests to God” (16). In “To the University of Cambridge, in New England,” written three years earlier, Wheatley addressed students at Harvard University as “an Ethiop” (12), urging them to avoid sin. Her choice of persona evokes Jeremiah 13:23, and the impossibility of the Ethiopian changing her skin underscores a central Calvinist paradox: if her readers could not change, why exhort them? Wheatley may have been responding to the liberalizing strain at Harvard that was associated with Unitarianism.
This early interest in the human capacity for change manifests as well in the antislavery message of “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth” (1773), where Wheatley imagines the “pangs excruciating” (128) suffered by her parents when she was stolen from them. The political aspect of her interest in psychological and social change appears in her poems on the Revolution, as well as in her public letter to Samson Occom of 1774, where she emphasizes that “in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance; and by the Leave of our modern Egyptians I will assert, that the same Principle lives in us” (153). Wheatley’s reference to “modern Egyptians” evokes Revolutionary rhetoric that figured the British in those terms – with George Washington as Moses leading the Israelites to freedom – but applies the moniker to American slaveholders.
There is a large body of controversial writing on religion from the colonial and early national periods. Quakers defended their faith against mainstream Protestants and debated among themselves in pamphlets that appeared in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Catholics asserted themselves and defended their faith against Protestant critics in the years after the Revolution. One type of publication gave a new twist to the elastic genre of the conversion narrative, as former Protestants like John Thayer wrote about their attraction to the Catholic Church. Boston born and Yale educated, Thayer (1755–1815) was ordained as a Congregational minister and served as a chaplain in the Revolutionary Army. His conversion to Catholicism in 1783 during a visit to Rome created a sensation in New England. In 1788 a Baltimore press reprinted the London edition of An account of the conversion of the Reverend Mr. John Thayer. Thayer was ordained the following year, and in 1790 he returned to the United States, where he served briefly as a priest in Boston before moving on to scattered congregations in Virginia and Kentucky. His conversion narrative helped make the issue of the miraculous a touchstone of religious controversy for decades to come, as registered in Emerson’s Divinity School address.
In 1815 another son of New England published a narrative of his conversion, when An apology for the conversion of Stephen Cleveland Blythe, to the faith of the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church: Respectfully addressed to Protestants of every denomination was published in New York, and later in Montreal. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, Blythe (1771–c. 1840) was baptized in the Episcopalian church, attended a Congregational church for a time, experienced a Methodist revival, and explored a number of traditions including Moravianism, Universalism, Unitarianism, Swedenborgianism, and Islam. After moving to Boston in 1805, Blythe began a dialogue with the local bishops, which culminated in his conversion four years later. Like Orestes Brownson (1803–1876), who followed a similar spiritual path in the 1830s and 1840s, Blythe’s turn to Catholicism appears to have been motivated in part by his desire for a spiritual anchor. It was also a response to the intense political partisanship of the early republic (Franchot 1994: 280–286).
Apart from conversion narratives, the number of expressly Catholic publications in the early years following independence was not large. The immigrant Irish printer Matthew Carey published a Roman Catholic Douay‐Rheims Version English Bible in 1790. Based in Philadelphia, Carey’s firm established a short‐lived partnership with a bookseller in Mexico City in the 1820s, which provided a conduit for an exchange of books between the two North American powers that was based in part on Catholic religious affiliation (Vogeley 2011). Father Félix Varela served as another important vector for Spanish Catholic writing. Born in Cuba and raised in St. Augustine, Florida, Varela returned to Cuba as a teenager. There he entered the priesthood and launched his literary and intellectual career. In 1823 he moved to New York, where he played a vital role in that city’s changing religious and literary culture, founding a newspaper, engaging in interfaith dialogues, and publishing works of moral philosophy and spiritual guidance. Varela contributed to a burgeoning Catholic print culture: the first Catholic newspaper in the United States was founded in Charlestown, South Carolina in 1822, while Boston’s The Pilot was established in 1829. During this time, there was an influx of Irish and German Catholic immigrants whose presence would in coming years reshape society and politics and enrich the religious texture of American literature.
Like Catholic works from the colonial period, Quaker writings often highlighted the physical and cultural mobility of their authors, and their linguistic facility. These qualities manifest themselves in distinctive ways in the works of Francis Daniel Pastorius, the founder of Germantown who kept a multilingual manuscript book called “The Bee‐hive,” and in the narrative of Elizabeth Ashbridge, a convert to Quakerism whose spiritual journey was bound up with her transatlantic wanderings. John Woolman, the best‐known devout Quaker writer of the colonial era, focused his considerable literary skills on the public journal and political essays in which he presented a vision of self and society focused on personal and political harmony.
Pastorius (1651–c. 1720) was born in Bavaria, Germany, studying law and international polity before moving to Pennsylvania in 1683. There he helped establish Germantown and collaborated on the Germantown Protest of 1688, the first known colonial document to oppose slavery. A skilled linguist, Pastorius assembled a substantial library and left a large body of manuscripts in addition to his published works. His writings reflect his interest in the variousness of the world, including the diversity of peoples and languages, while at the same time identifying underlying commonalities that could produce harmonious societies. In poems like “In These Seven Languages” and “A Token of Love & Gratitude” he explored the spiritual sources of harmony and the mediating role of language (Erben 2012: 55–67).
Some Account of the Early Part of the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge (composed c. 1745; publ. 1774) is a first‐person narrative that portrays the author’s spiritual seeking, set in the tumultuous religious scene of the North Atlantic world of the mid‐eighteenth century. Ashbridge (1713–1755) was born in England to Anglican parents, and even as a child she had questions: “I took notice there were several different religious societies; wherefore I often went alone and wept; with desires that I might be directed to the one which it would be best for me to join” (Ashbridge 1990: 148). Other forms of desire gave her trouble as well. She eloped when she was just 14, only to have her husband die five months later. Her mother forgave her but her father did not, and his rigidity set her on a path of physical and spiritual wandering. She moved to Dublin to live with her mother’s relative, who was a member of the Society of Friends. She later moved again to Ireland’s west coast, staying with relatives who practiced Roman Catholicism. Eventually Ashbridge traveled to New York. There, after completing the terms of her indentured service, she married a man named Sullivan, and the couple traveled around New England and the Middle Atlantic region. Ashbridge was spiritually as well as physically restless. She briefly joined the Baptist church, then returned to the Church of England (that is, the Anglican Church).
In the late 1730s she embraced the Quaker faith, persevering despite prolonged and sometimes violent resistance from her husband, and she remained in the Society of Friends until her death in Ireland, where she had traveled to preach. Part of the attraction that the Friends held for Ashbridge was the major role that the Society granted to women. Disputes over women’s religious expression contributed to the controversy surrounding the revivals of the Great Awakening, leading some evangelical leaders to reject a public role for female worshipers. Emphasizing the guidance of the Spirit, the Friends rejected all outward forms of distinction, including restrictions on women’s public religious speech. This concentration on substance over form is visible in Ashbridge’s prose style, which relates an elaborate history of travel and a volatile personal life with remarkable compression. The first section of the narrative describes her rapidly changing circumstances, while the second section focuses on her struggle to embrace the Quaker faith and win her husband’s tolerance and respect for her choices.
A similar directness and simplicity characterize the style of John Woolman (1720–1772). Woolman came to know Ashbridge through the Society, and he read her narrative before composing his Journal. Compared to her itinerant youth, Woolman’s early years in New Jersey were quite stable, and the incidents that he related from this period involve his spiritual and ethical development. As the child of Quaker parents, he had less of a struggle coming to a sense of his religious identity and was consequently able to focus on his unfolding spiritual sensibility.
In one central scene he describes a dream that he had when he was about nine involving the sun and moon, a withering tree, and an imaginary creature that he calls a “sun worm.” Though the dream clearly made an impression on him, he does not suggest a context or pause to interpret it. Rather, he moves directly into another story of his childhood in which he killed a mother bird with a stone, then “seized with horror” at what he had done, climbed the tree and killed the baby birds left behind in the nest to prevent their cruel suffering. He concludes this scene with a moral about the divine principle in “the human mind which incites to exercise goodness toward every living creature.” This principle can be cultivated, or it can be rejected, leading to “a contrary disposition” (1971: 24–25). Later, Woolman relates how his mature moral sense led him to conclude that slavery was contrary to God’s will. He made opposition to slavery a focus of his later life, publishing Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (1754) and traveling around the colonies to lecture against the practice at Quaker meetings. He died in England, where he had traveled to attend the London Yearly Meeting and successfully sought their endorsement of the antislavery position.
Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) turned Quaker theology into a theme for Gothic fiction. In Wieland (1798), the most studied of his novels, Brown associated his Quaker faith with violent, explosive elements in the early republic. During the American Revolution, Brown had been traumatized by the violence inflicted on members of the Philadelphia Quaker community by supporters of the Revolution who suspected the pacifist Quakers of Loyalism. His father was taken into custody and sent to Virginia, where he was held under debilitating conditions. In Wieland, Brown gives the Quaker inner light a gruesome literal significance when he attributes the family patriarch’s death to spontaneous combustion. He also reflects in sensational ways on the proximity between inspiration and madness. Brown’s Quaker background routinely figures in discussions of his work, usually in a superficial way.
The Jewish presence in British North America dates back to the early seventeenth century. Roger Williams was an important voice for an expansive understanding of religious liberty that included Judaism, both in the Providence colony and in England. Williams helped persuade Oliver Cromwell to allow Jews to enter legally, more than three centuries after King Edward I expelled them. There is a small body of religious writings by Jewish American authors from the early period, including two letters from the 1790s by Rebecca Samuel, a German Jewish immigrant who lived with her family in several southern coastal towns. Writing to her parents from Petersburg, Virginia, Samuel described the mix of freedom and constraint that American Jews experienced in different regions. The number of Jews in Virginia was too small to provide a satisfying religious community, with no Jewish cemetery and the largest congregation, in Richmond, struggling to assemble a quorum. At the same time, there was considerable freedom and economic opportunity, and “all live at peace. Anyone can do what he wants. There is no rabbi in all of America to excommunicate anyone.” In Virginia, “Jew and Gentile are as one. There is no galut [“exile,” rejection of Jews].” Samuel had heard that things were different in New York, where there was a more concentrated presence of Germans, both Jewish and Christian, and prejudices from the old country (i.e., galut) persisted. In her second, undated letter, Samuel was less sanguine about the possibilities for Jewish life in Petersburg, and she told of the family’s plans to move to Charleston, South Carolina. “The whole reason why we are leaving this place is because of [lack of] Yehudishkeit [Jewishness],” she told her parents. “My children cannot learn anything here, nothing Jewish, nothing of general culture” (Marcus 1959: 51–54).
Samuel’s sense of the thinness of Jewish identity in the early United States resonates with a more general observation about American religious life that Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur presented in Letters from an American Farmer (1782; 2013). In “What is an American?” the French writer described a landscape populated by a diffuse and religiously diverse society, and he projected a gradual wearing away of strong denominational identities and the emergence of a moderate, tolerant, and socially oriented national religious life. Describing a neighborhood where a Catholic lived near a German Lutheran and a Low Dutchman, he anticipated that in the absence of strong religious institutions,
their children will […] grow up less zealous and more indifferent in matters of religion than their parents. The foolish vanity, or, rather, the fury of making proselytes, is unknown here; they have no time, the seasons call for all their attention, and thus in a few years, this mixed neighborhood will exhibit a strange religious medley, that will be neither pure Catholicism nor pure Calvinism.
(de Crèvecoeur 2013: 36)
The children will intermarry, and increasingly families will choose their religious affiliation for convenience. Crèvecoeur presents a happy outcome: “Persecution, religious pride, the love of contradiction are the food of what the world commonly calls religion. These motives have ceased here; zeal in Europe is confined; here it evaporates in the great distance it has to travel; there it is a grain of powder enclosed, here it burns away in the open air, and consumes without effect” (37). Crèvecoeur’s description resonates with both John Adams’s portrait of religious pluralism at the First Continental Congress and Benjamin Franklin’s hopeful view of religious freedom, symbolized by the Assembly Hall in Philadelphia.
A literary history commensurate with Franklin’s vision would build on current directions in the field, notably multiethnic, multilingual, and transnational approaches. The most mature areas of inquiry involve the Puritan tradition and its offshoots, including works by Native American and African American authors influenced by evangelical Protestantism. The many forms of Indigenous religion and their accompanying modes of orature, as well as the place of African retentions in African American religious expression, are areas that merit future study. There is an emerging body of work on Spanish American Catholic writers, while the Jesuit Relations are beginning to attract attention from historians and literary critics. Perhaps the largest understudied body of writing at present is by German American authors, many of them working in pietist traditions. The range of genres – sermons, conversion narratives, ethnographies, mission reports, novels, poetry and song, and so forth – as well as the diversity of languages, histories, and theologies pose challenges for critical comparison. The place of ritual and ceremony, which Perry Miller held to be contrary to the spirit of American writing, could instead offer a conceptual framework suited to the heterogeneous modes of religious expression, enabling the varieties of American religion to “uplift and vivify” the study of American literature.
See also: chapter 4 (the puritan culture of letters); chapter 8 (migration, exile, imperialism); chapter 12 (early native american literacies to 1820); chapter 19 (early american evangelical print culture); chapter 20 (the first black atlantic).