The origins of American religious nationalism, 1787--1832.
详细信息
文摘
In 1830, in his Second Annual Message to Congress, Andrew Jackson spoke on the dispossession of the southeastern Indians. Jackson's provocative address marked the first time a U.S. President invoked a theological justification for an imperial action. My dissertation shows that Jackson's unprecedented action is best understood as an unintended and ironic consequence of the contest for governance of the frontier.;The dissertation tells a story about how nationalism generated new institutions and new relationships between the frontier and the Northeastern elite in the early republic. It is primarily a story about poor white settlers and Indians on the frontier and elite Northeastern religious nationalists torn between a mission to civilize Indians and a newly sacred nationalism.;After the Revolution, the disorder and urgency of American continental imperialism gave rise to two distinct Protestant movements. The first, frontier revivalism, arose on the periphery of the republic and involved hundreds of thousands of mostly poor settlers. American Methodism, Baptism, Mormonism, Shakerism, the Disciples of Christ, all emerged out of this upheaval. Contrary to current treatments by scholars, which treat frontier revivalism as a nationalist force, the dissertation shows that, even into the 1820s, the nation-state remained marginal to key elements of popular religion on the frontier.;National evangelism was the second, post-Revolutionary, religious movement generated by the imperative of continental expansion. National evangelism began as a literary movement among a small group of elite Northeastern religious nationalists. Alarmed by the threat posed that frontier revivalism posed to the national mission, Timothy Dwight, Elias Boudinot, and other Northeastern religious nationalists abandoned their literary endeavors and helped reinvent American missionary societies that had been founded to convert Indians.;Voluntary societies such as the American Bible Society, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and many others won generous support from leading members of the Northeastern business and political classes. The most familiar achievement of these institutions is denominationalism, a sociological system invented to help nationalize the frontier by regulating religious challenges to political authority. I argue that through path-breaking modes of corporate organization, national scales of operations, theological innovations, and the proliferation of print media, the religious voluntary associations also functioned as historically novel nation-building institutions.;The extraordinary, and often clumsy, efforts of the nation-building organizations to "awaken" frontier settlers, however, also aggravated class and regional antagonisms, particularly after the Panic of 1819 and the dissertation concludes with a new interpretation about the rise of Andrew Jackson. I argue that, by resolving the dialectic between populist, frontier revivalism and the millennial nationalism of the national evangelists, Jackson became America's first truly national political leader. From the White House, Jackson would steal the Northern missionaries' holy thunder in order to repudiate their mission of civilizing Indians. It marked an important moment in the transformation of the first modern republic founded on a separation of church and state into the western political democracy in which religion was most central to public life.