Customer Reviews

Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature

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This is a wonderful and delightful book. Prof. Fessenden shows that in the United States, secularism has not been religiously neutral or open to all forms of spirituality. Instead, she shows how America's particular form of secularism was inundanted with Protestant norms and ideas. The first half of the book is a marvelous study of religion in America from the colonial period to the Civil War. It discusses the importance of violence in Puritan mentalities and the Bible battles between Catholics and Protestants. The second half of the book is an intriguing study of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mark Twain, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fessenden is at her best examining Mark Twain's clothing choices and Fitzgerald's Catholic WASPishness. Recommended for all students of religion.

As my review in _Literature and Theology_ explains, "Much might be said of both Fessenden's wide temporal scope and impressive depth of research, but a book as rich as this leaves one impatient with cliches. [...] Too often work in this area ends up re-instantiating the same oversimplifications it claims to unpack, but Culture and Redemption is full of counterintuitive insights into how, for instance, `the vaunted secularization of public education was made an instrument for maintaining its Protestant character' (66)." In short, this is valuable reading for students and scholars of American literature, history, and religion alike, a book likely to provoke thoughtful interdisciplinary dialogue for years to come.

Many Americans wish to believe that the United States, founded in religious tolerance, has gradually and naturally established a secular public sphere that is equally tolerant of all religions--or none. This book suggests otherwise. The author contends that the uneven separation of church and state in America, far from safeguarding an arena for democratic flourishing, has functioned instead to promote particular forms of religious possibility while containing, suppressing, or excluding others. At a moment when questions about the appropriate role of religion in public life have become trenchant as never before, this book radically challenges conventional depictions--celebratory or damning--of America's "secular" public sphere. Examining American legal cases, children's books, sermons, and polemics together with popular and classic works of literature from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, this book shows how the vaunted secularization of American culture proceeds not as an inevitable by-product of modernity, but instead through concerted attempts to render dominant forms of Protestant identity continuous with democratic, civil identity. The author shows this process to be thoroughly implicated, moreover, in practices of often-violent exclusion that go to the making of national culture: Indian removals, forced acculturations of religious and other minorities, internal and external colonizations, and exacting constructions of sex and gender. Her new readings of Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Stowe, Twain, Gilman, Fitzgerald, and others who address themselves to these dynamics in intricate and often unexpected ways advance a major reinterpretation of American writing.