The line between opaque and evocative is a fine one, and John Lardas Modern walks it with dark delight in these ruminations on modernity, circa 1851, the year Herman Melville published Moby-Dick. Secularism in Antebellum America is a book about hauntings, about the joined enchantments and disenchantments that constitute modernity as an especially shadowy and ghost-ridden terrain. It is also a book, in fine Foucauldian fashion that conjures up the murky powers of discourse—“an airy substance,” “an amorphous constellation” of social representations, moral precepts, and linguistic conventions from which modern subjects cannot escape (xxviii). Through that discursive mode of analysis, Modern aims to unsettle (among other things) “the congealed mythos of religious freedom” in which newly unencumbered individuals surveyed their choices and determined their own religious or irreligious identities (6). Accordingly, Modern works from the premise that personal agency is mostly a mirage and dwells instead on the systems and structures that turn an imagined autonomy into a network of coercions. Among the most restrictive is the disciplinary edifice of secularism itself—the ways in which “true religion” is channeled under secular regimes into particular forms of voluntary association, rationalized organization, and spiritual inwardness (8–9). In the field of American religious history it is relatively rare to get such sustained engagement with Foucault's genealogical method, Derrida's hauntology, Talal Asad's formations of the secular, or even Charles Taylor's secular age. In turn, whether historians will want to engage Modern's work will have a lot to do with how much they think they gain from participating in those larger theoretical discussions. It will also have a lot to do with how much patience or ardor they have for the circumlocutions of high-end academic diction: epistemics, the secular imaginary, systematicity, spectrality, autopoiesis, “and so on and so forth” (285).

Not that Modern shunts historical work aside in order to adumbrate “the imperial discourse of secularism” (117). He is intent on showing, again in his terms, the viral spread of secularism through the very capillaries of antebellum religious life—how a secular logic was diffused across denominational subcultures and became pervasively powerful by the 1850s. Evangelicals, Unitarians, phrenologists, and spiritualists—all embraced a program of managerial efficiency, mass-media outreach, statistical demonstration, and technological innovation; all could get on board with the notion that Christianity and secular progress were mutually sustaining. Whatever religious distinctions existed among Protestant and post-Protestant groups, the same impersonal forces, the same forms of sociality and mediated interconnection, shaped a conventionalized sense of selfhood. Most interested in the air that everyone breathed, Modern nonetheless wants to bring that atmosphere into greater visibility through close attention to particular cases. He does this with notable effectiveness in his thorough examination of Orson Fowler's phrenology and its contribution to the reimagining of spirituality (again as a discursive formation). Modern also has a good eye for evangelical examples: say, the surprisingly bureaucratic administration of colportage. Still, the colporteur as rationalized instrument is but a scene in a larger drama in which evangelicalism and secularism proceed together in an endless feedback loop. Soon enough, it becomes apparent that even the generative date of 1851 is but an arbitrary marker in the overarching “metaphysics of secularism” that Modern pursues like a white whale (45).

Perhaps the most obvious way in which Modern's desire to theorize overrides his commitment to historicize comes in the very notion around which he organizes his meditations—namely, secularism. Modern uses the term to connote the “invisible consensus” behind antebellum religious variety, a set of “first principles” through which Anglo-American Protestantism necessarily expressed and organized itself (21). Yet, secularism as an overtly codified program had very little purchase in antebellum America; it had just begun to find clear articulation in the work of the British freethinkers George Jacob Holyoake and Charles Bradlaugh in the 1850s and 1860s (Bradlaugh organized the National Secular Society in 1866). Direct American cognates, including the National Liberal League and the American Secular Union, were developments primarily of the 1870s and 1880s. That particular transatlantic exchange gets slight notice in Modern's work, perhaps precisely because it was so palpable rather than spectral and amorphous. Secularism in such freethinking circles entailed painstakingly specific demands for how religion and the state were to be disjoined from one another. To write a book on secularism in the mid-nineteenth century while ignoring its most explicit architects is an inscrutable exercise, though there is little doubt that Modern wants it that way. Grasping hold of secularism as a talisman of current philosophical and anthropological debates, he sometimes seems to float away from the historical worlds he otherwise studies with such relish. Once in that rarefied air it is of little importance that “evangelical secularism,” as Modern admits, “did not even exist at the level of empirical reality” in the antebellum period—only that the academic seer can discern it hovering ghost-like in the atmosphere (55). Such intellectual feats can be clever and evocative; they can also be pompous and opaque. To wit: “Yet in framing secularism in terms of recursivity, of structures looping back upon themselves and the individuals who precipitated them, I also frame practices as recursive sites in which the accelerating convolution of a self-environment complex is ordered and given momentary pause. This is a process whereby each day seems like a natural fact” (288). How one views such acts of scholarly divining will determine whether one wants to take up Modern's book or keep it at arm's length.