The Origins of American Religious Nationalism

by Sam Haselby

Overview

Sam Haselby offers a new and persuasive account of the role of religion in the formation of American nationality, showing how a contest within Protestantism reshaped American political culture and led to the creation of an enduring religious nationalism.

Following U.S. independence, the new republic faced vital challenges, including a vast and unique continental colonization project undertaken without, in the centuries-old European senses of the terms, either "a church" or "a state." Amid this crisis, two distinct Protestant movements arose: a popular and rambunctious frontier revivalism; and a nationalist, corporate missionary movement dominated by Northeastern elites. The former heralded the birth of popular American Protestantism, while the latter marked the advent of systematic Protestant missionary activity in the West.

The explosive economic and territorial growth in the early American republic, and the complexity of its political life, gave both movements opportunities for innovation and influence. This book explores the competition between them in relation to major contemporary developments-political democratization, large-scale immigration and unruly migration, fears of political disintegration, the rise of American capitalism and American slavery, and the need to nationalize the frontier. Haselby traces these developments from before the American Revolution to the rise of Andrew Jackson. His approach illuminates important changes in American history, including the decline of religious distinctions and the rise of racial ones, how and why "Indian removal" happened when it did, and with Andrew Jackson, the appearance of the first full-blown expression of American religious nationalism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199329571
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	04/01/2015
Series:	Religion in America
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Sam Haselby is a historian of religion and American political culture. He earned his PhD at Columbia University, was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, and has been a faculty member at the American University of Beirut and the American University in Cairo. His writings on U.S. politics and religion in historical perspective have appeared in The International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe, and The Guardian. He is working on a book about the opium trade. Currently, he is a visiting faculty member at Columbia University.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1 The Powers of the Earth: Secularism and American Nationalism
Chapter 2 ''The Songs of a Nation'': The Connecticut Wits and the New English Empire
Chapter 3 To Raise a Holy People, Wear No Slouched Hat: The Methodist Settlement of the Frontier
Chapter 4 Sovereignty and Salvation on the Frontier of the Early Republic
Chapter 5 ''The Love of Order and Righteous Laws'': Early National Liberals and the Missions Movement
Chapter 6 ''A Complete Chain of Communication'': Religious Literature and Protestant Nation-Building
Epilogue—A Monster and the Wandering Savage: The Resolution of Frontier Revivalism and National Evangelism
Index

Editorial Reviews

"ambitious and thought-provoking book that challenges common understandings of the earliest stages of American nationalism." — Carl C. Creason, Reading Religion

"Haselby's elaboration of the meaningful conflict between popular frontier evangelicalism and the elite, northeastern missionizing establishment is an important contribution." — Seth Perry, Princeton University, The Journal of Religion

"Although Haselby's story is most relevant to nineteenth-century U.S. history, the legacy of his story—again with Trump in mind—is far from finished.... Haselby may hold the key to explaining what so far has escaped most scholars and pundits who are still scratching their heads about the 2016 presidential contest—namely, Trump's appeal to evangelical voters for whom his flagrant flaunting of Christian morality should be repugnant."—Foreign Policy Research Institute

"Haselby's work [integrates] a vast literature on nationalism, print culture, immigration and migration, technological change, and race... [and] has placed religion at the centre of the story of nation-building during the tumultuous years between Jefferson and Jackson. Scholars of American religion in general, and the early national era in particular, will not want to ignore this book."—Journal of Religious History

"The Origins of American Religious Nationalism is also well timed. Haselby completed his study before the current presidential campaign, but his stress on a populist, white nationalism developing in the first decades after the American Revolution will now be read in the context of Black Lives Matter and Donald Trump. Haselby's argument is crisply stated."—Los Angeles Review of Books

"Exactly 50 years ago, in the summer of 1966, sociologist Robert Bellah composed what would become one of the most cited scholarly essays of the postwar era. The title, 'Civil Religion in America,' was unprepossessing, but the timing was superb....Sam Haselby's The Origins of American Religious Nationalism is also well timed. Haselby completed his study before the current presidential campaign, but his stress on a populist, white nationalism developing in the first decades after the American Revolution will now be read in the context of Black Lives Matter and Donald Trump."—John T. McGreevy, Los Angeles Review of Books

"His research is meticulous, and the argument is compelling...In Haselby's careful hands... [Andrew] Jackson represents... a new Protestant nationalism that would conquer the West and soon to rise to imperialist notions of manifest destiny."—American Historical Review

"The Origins of American Nationalism is a thoughtful book. It will spur further research on regionalism, nationalism, frontier religion, and northeastern missions efforts."—Journal of American History

"A historian's history executed with tremendous concrete specificity about the gradual emergence of American national identity."—Journal of American Academy of Religion

"[A] very fine, fresh reinterpretation...of protestant and kindred movements across the fast growing new nation... it recalls other sweeping narratives... a subtitle of 'an intellectual history'...would describe well the richness of his assessment. This is a very important and readable volume." —Church History

"The Origins of American Religious Nationalism is an important contribution... it shows that westward expansion was not merely the logical result of nationalist ideas held by people such as Jefferson but...[that it] transformed nationalist thought in fundamental ways. Most importantly, it demonstrates that the religious and political histories of America's early Republic are best understood in tandem."—William and Mary Quarterly

"[An] impressive and powerfully argued book [showing]... that in the decades following the American Revolution it was American Protestantism and not any sort of classical republicanism that was most important in shaping the development of American nationalism.... Haselby's argument... has a convincing power. He brings together so many loose ends and ties them up in such a neat package that the reader cannot help being persuaded to accept it whole... he has written a book to be reckoned with."—Gordon Wood, The New York Review of Books

"Like the works of [Perry] Miller, [Sacvan] Bercovitch, and others in their tradition, The Origins of American Religious Nationalism traces the geneses of a set of ideas, a way of thinking. Unlike those authors, Haselby writes in a precise and restrained scope, and... recognizes that discourse about 'origins' itself is a particular sort of political strategy and, indeed, at the same time a component of the ideology he is tracing. There are lots of books about religion, politics, missions, and nationalism in the early American republic. Haselby's is the best one."—Religion in American History

"The Origins of American Religious Nationalism defies easy categorization. This is a clear asset: by blurring...old lines of debate, Haselby invites the historical community to reimagine the religious and intersectional struggles that quickly followed upon American independence....Origins of American Religious Nationalism provides a new narrative of faith and nationhood that will likely earn it a place on future graduate reading lists and further stimulate engagement with American Protestant history."—H-Net

"...[A] provocative study..." —CHOICE

"In this revelatory narrative, contrasting the competing visions of itinerant frontier preachers and institutionally-based New England evangelicals, Haselby brilliantly illuminates flashpoints of political as well as religious history. While tracking the progress of American Protestantism toward nondenominationalism and missionary enterprise, he tells a suspenseful political story deeply interwoven with the success of nationalism and dynamically rife with sectional and class tensions." —Nancy F. Cott, Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History, Harvard University

"This book provides a fresh, creative, and persuasive account of religion in the early American republic and the relation of religious movements to national politics. It is particularly good on the fierce competition that developed between populist revivalists on the frontier and nationally-minded Christian leaders on the eastern seaboard-and on how that competition led eventually to the national acceptance of slavery. This study is particularly important for charting the impact of religion on politics and vice versa."
—Mark Noll, author of America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln

"This important book explains how the early United States became a battleground for competing visions of Protestant Christianity. Through incisive analysis of the separation of church and state, competition for souls on the frontier, and the rise of evangelical missions, Sam Haselby shows that the question is not if America was originally a Christian nation, but if it was a nation at all, and whose Christianity would rule."
—Adam Rothman, Associate Professor of History, Georgetown University

From the Publisher