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

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)

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.