Culture and Redemption
Subtitle
Religion, the Secular, and American Literature
Many Americans wish to believe that the U.S., 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. 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.
Bio
Tracy Fessenden is a professor of religious studies and interim director of the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University.
Praise for this book
'Culture and Redemption' is a wonderfully refreshing book about anomalies of power among America's religions and cultures. Tracy Fessenden's expansive and often surprising readings demonstrate that strongly Protestant and broadly religious concerns persistently upended the seemingly natural triumph of secularism in America, with powerful effects on our literature and ethics alike. In short, a fascinating book.
Jon Butler Yale University
"Tracy Fessenden's 'Culture and Redemption' is an important work of scholarship. The book makes a compelling case for seeing particular forms of Protestant religion as an 'unmarked category' in American cultural analysis and urges a rethinking of some major works of American literature in relation to that category. The book is tightly argued, thoroughly researched, and consistently well written."
Lucy Maddox Georgetown University
