Secularism in Antebellum America
John Lardas Modern
Abstract
Ghosts, railroads, Sing Sing, and sex machines are just a few of the phenomena that appear in this account of religion and society in nineteenth-century America. This book uncovers surprising connections between secular ideology and the rise of new technologies that opened up new ways of being religious. Exploring the eruptions of religion in New York's penny presses, the budding fields of anthropology and phrenology, and Moby Dick, the book challenges the strict separation between the religious and the secular that remains integral to discussions about religion today. It frames the study arou ... More
Ghosts, railroads, Sing Sing, and sex machines are just a few of the phenomena that appear in this account of religion and society in nineteenth-century America. This book uncovers surprising connections between secular ideology and the rise of new technologies that opened up new ways of being religious. Exploring the eruptions of religion in New York's penny presses, the budding fields of anthropology and phrenology, and Moby Dick, the book challenges the strict separation between the religious and the secular that remains integral to discussions about religion today. It frames the study around the dread, wonder, paranoia, and manic confidence of being haunted, arguing that experiences and explanations of enchantment fueled secularism's emergence. The awareness of spectral energies coincided with attempts to tame the unruly fruits of secularism—in the cultivation of a spiritual self among Unitarians, for instance, or in John Murray Spear's erotic longings for a perpetual motion machine. Combining theoretical inquiry with historical arcana, the book examines long-held views of religion and the methods of narrating its past.
Keywords:
ghosts,
railroads,
Sing Sing,
sex machines,
religion,
society,
new technologies,
penny presses,
anthropology,
phrenology
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2011 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226533230 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: March 2013 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226533254.001.0001 |
