Many Americans wish to believe that the United States, founded
in religious tolerance, has gradually and naturally established a
secular public sphere that is equally tolerant of all religions--or
none. "Culture and Redemption" suggests otherwise. Tracy Fessenden
contends that the uneven separation of church and state in America,
far from safeguarding an arena for democratic flourishing, has
functioned instead to promote particular forms of religious
possibility while containing, suppressing, or excluding others. At
a moment when questions about the appropriate role of religion in
public life have become trenchant as never before, "Culture and
Redemption" radically challenges conventional
depictions--celebratory or damning--of America's "secular" public
sphere.
Examining American legal cases, children's books, sermons, and
polemics together with popular and classic works of literature from
the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, "Culture and
Redemption" shows how the vaunted secularization of American
culture proceeds not as an inevitable by-product of modernity, but
instead through concerted attempts to render dominant forms of
Protestant identity continuous with democratic, civil identity.
Fessenden shows this process to be thoroughly implicated, moreover,
in practices of often-violent exclusion that go to the making of
national culture: Indian removals, forced acculturations of
religious and other minorities, internal and external
colonizations, and exacting constructions of sex and gender. Her
new readings of Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Stowe, Twain, Gilman,
Fitzgerald, and others who address themselves to these dynamics in
intricate and often unexpected ways advance a major
reinterpretation of American writing.
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