Skepticism and American Faith from the Revolution to the Civil War

Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, the dialogue of religious skepticism and faith shaped struggles over the place of religion in politics. It produced different visions of knowledge and education in an "enlightened" society. It fueled social reform in an era of economic transformation, territorial expansion, and social change. Ultimately, as Christopher Grasso argues in this definitive work, it molded the making and eventual unmaking of American nationalism.

Religious skepticism has been rendered nearly invisible in American religious history, which often stresses the evangelicalism of the era or the "secularization" said to be happening behind people's backs, or assumes that skepticism was for intellectuals and ordinary people who stayed away from church were merely indifferent. Certainly the efforts of vocal "infidels" or "freethinkers" were dwarfed by the legions conducting religious revivals, creating missions and moral reform societies, distributing Bibles and Christian tracts, and building churches across the land. Even if few Americans publicly challenged Christian truth claims, many more quietly doubted, and religious skepticism touched--and in some cases transformed--many individual lives. Commentators considered religious doubt to be a persistent problem, because they believed that skeptical challenges to the grounds of faith--the Bible, the church, and personal experience--threatened the foundations of American society.

Skepticism and American Faith examines the ways that Americans--ministers, merchants, and mystics; physicians, schoolteachers, and feminists; self-help writers, slaveholders, shoemakers, and soldiers--wrestled with faith and doubt as they lived their daily lives and tried to make sense of their world.

Christopher Grasso is professor of history at the College of William and Mary and was the editor of the William and Mary Quarterly. He is the author of A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut and the editor of Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso's Civil War.

Note on Sources
Introduction
I: Revolutions, 1775-1815
1. Deist Hero, Deist Monster: On Religious Common Sense in the Wake of the American Revolution
2. Souls Rising: The Authority of the Inner Witness, and Its Limits
3. Instituting Skepticism: The Emergence of Organized Deism
4. Instituting Skepticism: Contention, Endurance, and Invisibility

II. Enlightenments, 1790-1845
5. Skeptical Enlightenment: An American Education in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania
6. Christian Enlightenment: Eastern Cities and the Great West
7. Christian Enlightenment: Faith into Practice in Marion, Missouri
8. Revelation and Reason: New Englanders in the Early Nineteenth Century
III. Reforms, 1820-1850
9. Faith in Reform: Remaking Society, Body, and Soul
10. Infidels, Protestants, and Catholics: Religion and Reform in Boston
11. Converting Skeptics: Infidel and Protestant Economies

IV. Sacred Causes, 1830-1865
12. Political Hermeneutics: Nullifying the Bible and Consolidating Proslavery Christianity
13. Lived Experience and the Sacred Cause: Faith, Skepticism, and Civil War
Epilogue: Death and Politics
Appendix: Grounds of Faith and Modes of Skepticism
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index