Research Catalog

Title

Beyond a Christian commonwealth : the Protestant quarrel with the American Republic, 1830-1860 / Mark Y. Hanley.

Author

Hanley, Mark Y.

Publication

Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, ©1994.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

x, 210 pages; 24 cm

Summary

Antebellum mainline Protestant ministers are often portrayed as heralds of a national "faith" in republican progress that reached its high point in the three decades before the Civil War. Mark Hanley argues, however, that the liberal culture that emerged in America between 1830 and 1860 seriously eroded mainstream Protestant confidence in the spiritual yield of republican liberty and faith. Through their "religious jeremiads," the vast body of sermons and sermonic literature that reached inward to the exclusive world of believers rather than outward to the nation at large, troubled ministers responded to the growing distance between their hopes for spiritual community and an emergent liberal culture marked by acquisitive materialism and social and intellectual diversity. By tapping neglected sources that give fuller focus to Protestant religious interests, Hanley challenges the notion that enthusiastic endorsements of millennialism and material progress had effectively silenced mainstream Protestant dissent in the late antebellum period. He locates this dissent within a transdenominational struggle to secure Protestantism's spiritual claims from the materialism, cultural claims from the materialism, cultural arrogance, and radical freedom of a new liberal order.

Subject

• 1800-1899
• Protestant churches > United States > History > 19th century
• Christianity and culture > History of doctrines > 19th century
• 11.55 Protestantism
• Christianity and culture > History of doctrines
• Protestant churches
• Protestantismus
• Liberalismus
• Protestantse kerken
• Kerk en staat
• Geschichte 1830-1860
• United States > Church history > 19th century
• United States
• USA

Genre/Form

• Church history.
• History.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [187]-203) and index.

Contents

Spiritual visions, political fears, and the origins of antebellum Protestant dissent -- A critical republican vision -- Frontiers of spirit, frontiers of space -- The "new infidelity" : redemption as secular progress -- A community of the word.

ISBN

• 0807821217
• 9780807821213

LCCN

93008467

OCLC

• ocm28183686
• 28183686
• SCSB-2009724

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library