Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War

ISBN-13: 9780190494377 / Angielski / Twarda / 2018 / 664 str.

Christopher Grasso

Recenzje

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.

O autorze

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.