Customer Reviews

The Universalist Movement in America, 1770-1880 (Religion in America Life)

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This very well researched and sourced book has one over-arching virtue. The theme with which it starts, that Universalism was a sort of improved Calvinism, is actually rigorously and creatively brought throughout the whole book like a fascinating leitmotiv. On the way you are filled in on all sorts of curious social corners of American history, like the haughtiness of Unitarians, or the salvific pretensions of Phrenologists. But somehow the author manages to keep the notion of a Calvinism, disengaged from the limitations of Predestination, as a recurring rubric by which to see a complex subject throughout a tangled history. That made it very fascinating to read. One is left with the inevitable question whether the average believer of this type would have had anything like the complex combination of freed-up Calvinism and rationalist optimism which the main thinkers of the Universalist movement had. In fact the later speculations by the author of why the movement lessened later, namely that the liberal viewpoint was too much like others easily available elsewhere, raises the previous doubt. The cumulative effect of the books insights, at least for me, was that it was an attenuated form of opposition, both in terms of social class and religion. But the good thing is that the dense history provided could be read a different way. On that reading Universalism really was a Calvinist logic taken in a very different direction. From their perspective, the ineluctably correct one. The whole book is so well done that it raises a variety of cultural and religious questions powerfully. It is also a good read, if you are into religious topics. I took it on a trip to California a while ago, and was drawn to reading it straight through even on vacation.