Skepticism and American Faith

Between the Revolution and the Civil War, the dialogue of religious skepticism and faith profoundly shaped America. Although usually rendered nearly invisible, skepticism touched -- and sometimes transformed -- more lives than might be expected from standard accounts. This book examines Americans wrestling with faith and doubt as they tried to make sense of their world.

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Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, the dialogue of religious skepticism and faith shaped struggles over the place of religion in politics in the Revolutionary era. It then 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, it molded the making and eventual unmaking of American nationalism.

Yet religious skepticism has been rendered nearly invisible by the stories usually told about American religious history, which often stress the in-your-face evangelicalism of the era, or the "secularization" said to be happening behind people's backs, or assume that skepticism was for intellectuals while ordinary people who stayed away from church were merely indifferent. Certainly the efforts of small groups 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, however, many more quietly doubted, and religious skepticism touched -- and in some cases transformed -- more lives than we might expect from standard accounts. Commentators considered religious doubt to be a persistent problem, too, not because there were armies of skeptics marching in the streets but 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.