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.

About the Author
Christopher Grasso is professor of history at the College of William and Mary. He is the former editor of the William and Mary Quarterly and the author of A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut.

Reviews
An astonishing work of scholarship exploring the relationship between skepticism and faith from the late eighteenth century to the years just after the Civil War....Through a number of intellectual portraits, readers are guided from the deism of the 1780s through the growing attempts to stifle free thought and inquiry in a republic seized with all sorts of reformist fervor and rapidly evolving political and social institutions in the early to mid-nineteenth century.... All of the individuals discussed have complicated spiritual journeys that are carefully delineated....We are shown the little-discussed but important rise of skepticism among the enslaved population....Grasso moves deftly over the persistence of honest dissent, always fully sensitive to the complexity of skepticism. * Robert J. Wilson III, Journal of American History *
Skepticism and Faith establishes an impressive new framework for reconsidering many of the era's most pressing social, political, and economic concerns. It admirably revises and supersedes Henry May's taxonomic The Enlightenment in America (Oxford UP, 1975)...and provides essential historical grounding for emerging debates in secularization theory. * Douglas L. Winiarski, University of Richmond, Early American Literature *
Erudite and meticulously researched....By focusing on people's lived experiences, Grasso convincingly shows that skepticism was not just an attitude embraced by an intellectual elite but was a perspective that appealed to a broad spectrum of antebellum society, including women, free blacks, and enslaved peoples. He takes the perspectives of his historical subjects seriously, reconstructing their ideas, practices, and experiences. * Anthon M. Matytsin, Journal of Religion *
Learned and imaginative. Christopher Grasso challenges the conventional wisdom about belief and unbelief in the United States in the early American republic..Skepticism and American Faithsucceeds not only as an intellectual history but also as a work of lived religionand lived irreligionthrough its vivid sketches of seekers across the spiritual spectrum. * Christine Leigh Heyrman, American Historical Review *
Grasso unearthed a treasure trove of material from mostly obscure personages who entered the fray with a fury shortly after the American Revolution ... the story is well worth telling, and Grasso does a marvelous job in laying it out for curious readers. * F. G. Kirkpatrick, CHOICE *
Monumental... Skepticism and American Faith is one of the most inventive studies of the religious environment of America between the revolution and the Civil War in some time. * Seth Perry, Church History *
In Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War, historian Christopher Grasso contends that a persistent dialogue between skepticism and Christianity indelibly shaped the antebellum United States. With an eye for colorful characters-mechanics, preachers, housewives, reformers, slaveholders, soldiers, and many more-Grasso makes his case in admirable if sometimes excruciating detail. Readers will learn of Methodist preachers whose private doubts mushroomed into publicly scandalous unbelief, of self-proclaimed infidels lurching into Christian faith, of competing churches that painted each other as engines of infidelity, of pro-slavery clergymen who linked infidelity and abolitionism to form the dominant (white) Christianity of the South, and of abolitionist preachers who shaped US nationalism by warning against the national sins of slavery and unbelief. * Reading Religion *


Awards
Winner of Winner of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Prize.



Book Information
ISBN 9780190494377
Author Christopher Grasso
Format Hardback
Page Count 664
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 1043g
Dimensions(mm) 160mm * 239mm * 41mm