In 1790, the Methodist preacher Jesse Lee descended into a vault containing the body of the revivalist George Whitefield and cut a small piece of Whitefield’s preaching gown to carry with him in hopes that it would cause him to preach with the same zeal as the evangelist. By then, other evangelicals had been for years gathering around the deathbeds of their beloved families and friends to receive ‘memory objects’ that could make the departed feel present again. They treasured locks of hair, Bibles, hymnals, rings, brooches and objects of clothing, which became means of erasing the distance between heaven and earth. Their actions exemplified what Jamie Brummitt describes as a ‘relic culture’ that permeated antebellum American evangelical Protestantism between roughly 1740 and 1870.
This is a sprawling book that moves from Whitefield’s corpse and George Washington’s funeral to the embodied resistance of enslaved Africans, from portraiture to photography, from women’s needlework to religious polemics, from the bodies of dead children to the bodies of Civil War soldiers and from grieving parents to unbelieving sceptics. It also has a sprawling view of what is meant by ‘relic’. Wary of dictionary definitions, Brummitt prefers to describe a practice in which some objects have ‘agency’ and the ability to evoke the ‘real presence’ of someone absent. In practice, death can transform almost any material thing from a ‘dead object’ to a ‘supernatural relic’. This is, at least, the way I interpret her descriptions. On this topic, she has a right to some unclarity.
Brummitt traces a practice that extends from ancient Christianity through the Reformation era and the Enlightenment. But the heart of the book is the bereavement that produced an era of relics among ‘evangelical’ Protestants in America. For her purposes, an ‘evangelical’ was simply anyone who engaged in ‘specific kinds of mourning practices’ (p. 31). These practices include the gathering at the bedside, the hymns and prayers of family and friends, the distribution of memory objects and the inspection of the corpse for signs of salvation. They also include the veneration of relics. These practices define a segment of American Protestantism that cuts across denominational lines. It was probably one of the largest groups in American Protestantism, and it also cut across national boundaries, though Brummitt spends most of her time in the United States.
She believes that the widespread veneration of relics left a deep imprint on American culture. For one thing, relic practices silently infused into evangelical piety the ideas of David Hume and other Enlightenment thinkers about matter and memory. (I have some doubts about this.) For another, the craze for the relics of George Washington rooted American civil religion in Protestant soil. Moreover, the similarities between Protestant and Catholic practice gave Catholics a way to defend their American identity, and embroidered mourning pieces, a required component of women’s schooling, functioned as handmade relics in Protestant parlours. But the defining function of a ‘supernatural relic’ was to enable an ‘embodied, supernatural sense experience’ (p. 140), a phrase that Brummitt uses repeatedly.
The book could have just as easily been titled ‘Protestant Mourning’, because Brummitt gives as much attention to death and mourning as she does to relics. In the seventeenth century, she contends, clerics discouraged prolonged and pronounced mourning as a failure to accept the will of God. They frowned on all the activities that came to be associated later with the evangelical way of grieving. Under the influence of early eighteenth-century revivalists, however, especially John Wesley, some Protestants reversed direction. They began to encourage mourning. It became acceptable even for men to weep from a sense of loss. They began to hope for a ‘good death’, a dying that foreshadowed an eventual reunion in heaven.
In this scenario, relics served multiple purposes. They provided comforting memories that were so vivid and compelling that the dead were for a time truly present to the bereaved. They also reminded the bereaved to live so faithfully that they would be granted a reunion with the beloved for eternity. Presence would then no longer be a time-limited experience.
Brummitt gives a brief though conventional explanation of the dissolution of the relic culture. The professionalisation of dying and death in hospitals and funeral homes entailed a distancing from the older mourning practices; therapists redefined mourning as therapeutic, and embalming and cosmetics disguised death. The liberalisation of the twentieth-century Protestant mainstream undermined older certainties, and the commodification of memorials expanded their availability but cheapened their meaning. Historians, inclined towards believing a narrative of secularisation, overlooked, ignored or misinterpreted older styles of mourning. It is surely an unintentional exaggeration, though, to say that ‘Americans ceased to be a mourning people’ (p. 445). People might mourn differently in the twenty-first century, but mourning itself has not vanished.
Brummitt wanders from the thread of her argument from time to time, giving us extraneous information about related topics, but some of the most engaging and moving parts of the book are found in the descriptions of the dying. Reading about dying young people, even when the scenes are taken from evangelical magazines trying to drum up repentance, can be sobering and moving. One of the virtues of the book is that Brummitt never condescends.
Brummitt teaches in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. This book had its origins as a Duke University dissertation, and as one would expect, she has done substantial research in published journals and newspapers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as online archival collections of images and a long list of secondary works. She is part of a group of American historians of religion who have, in coordination with British and European scholars, enhanced the study of the past by turning attention to material culture. Excurses on the relevant historiography appear in most chapters, sometimes with appreciation but more often with corrections of what she believes to be errors.
Few keywords are repeated more frequently in the book than ‘supernatural’, paired with a variety of nouns: memory objects, relics, sense experiences, marks on corpses, remains, properties, principles, religious experiences, deathbed experiences, matter and Black matter. Most often, an object can be supernatural if it draws the observer into an especially meaningful experience of the presence of heavenly beings, be they God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit or the spirits of departed loved ones. But by this criterion, sermons, hymns, conversations, prayers, books, poems and even nature might be called supernatural. In any case, it is not clear to me how the historian can distinguish a supernatural experience from one that is, say, especially intense but still natural, or how one can distinguish supernatural objects from those simply carrying extraordinary emotional weight. I wonder if the distinction between the ordinary and the extraordinary might have been more useful to her.
This is solid scholarship that belongs on seminary and university bookshelves.
