In… [Woods’ ]interpretation, developments in other spheres were, of course, not unimportant””economy, demography, gender, religion, disease, commerce, learning””but none of them are allowed to crowd out republican political ideology as the driving force. The problem with this unilinear rendering is not its presentation of political ideology but rather the all-encompassing role given to the extrapolation of political ideology for explaining social change. As one of the most important spheres to highlight strengths and weaknesses of this general interpretation, religion serves unusually well.[2]
At several places in Empire of Liberty, Wood describes religion in this period as being defined, driven, or caused by the expanding logic of Revolutionary liberty. Thus, “As American society became more democratic ”¦, middling people rose to dominance and brought their religiosity with them.” Or, in the baldest expression, “The Revolution released torrents of popular religiosity and passion into American life.”
Such statements are subtly misleading. As Daniel Walker Howe once pointed out, there was indeed a great surge of evangelical religion in the post-Revolutionary period, and that surge certainly did relate to Revolutionary events. But taken no further, the story is incomplete. The religious surge in the early republic, suggests Howe, resulted from a number of factors, not all of them political and not all of them rooted in the Revolution: “the Puritan/evangelical tradition did not simply adapt to, or borrow from, modernity and democracy; it actively helped form them. Individualism, voluntarism, and contractualism were features of the Puritan/evangelical religious tradition before they were taken over by the secular political philosophers of possessive individualism.”
Thanks; well worth reading.
Noll argues that Asbury should have been better considered. Perhaps so also Wycliffe, among many others. The roots of American religious thought lie much deeper than its Revolution. And the relationship between political ideology and theology may be better dealt with as that of chicken and egg.
A well considered review, especially the concluding sentence (which is of a sort often seen in these sorts of reviews): If that Olympian goal in the end eludes Gordon Wood, it is more an indication of the fearsome complexity of the period than a complaint about the work of one of the nation’s truly great historians.
Historians need always approach their work with fear and trembling of doing their subjects justice.