Once upon a time, we had a very stable myth of religion's place in American literature. The Puritans left a legacy of Calvinism; that became Unitarianism; and Unitarianism finally gave birth to Transcendentalism and the American Renaissance, leading finally to later nineteenth-century attempts by some authors to replace religion altogether with literature. This story was mapped onto a narrative of secularization: the passing of Calvinism reflected the broader collapse of religion and the coming of a secular culture. It was a pleasing myth because it was so elegant and coherent, and because it did seem to explain certain select writers who were revered, in part, because they could be so well explained by this myth.

When scholars started seriously studying sentimental literature in 1977 – with Ann Douglas's Feminization of American Culture – we discovered a whole culture of writers who seemed never to have given up their Christian ideas and beliefs. At the same time, these writers and their deep Christian faith were dismissed as hangers-on, detractors, diminishments of a former Calvinist rigor. They were inconsequential pop culture, not America's best, and they didn't have much of a serious theology anyway. Jane Tompkins's Sensational Designs argued otherwise. Studying the “cultural work” of sentimental fiction, she found in it resources for social reform that placed women at the center of action, enabling a form of feminism based in the evangelical beliefs of nineteenth-century women. And now we have The Altar at Home, Claudia Stokes's definitive new account of sentimentalism and religion that asks, in part, what do we mean by “evangelical”?Footnote ¹

I sketch this history from Douglas to Tompkins to Stokes in order to foreground my first remark about religion and literature in nineteenth-century studies: we literary scholars seem to be finding religion. And by that, I mean that we are discovering aspects of American religious culture that scholars in religious studies and historians of American religion have long known and studied. Stokes, for example, introduces literary scholars to the full impact of Methodism – making an argument so strong that it seems obvious in retrospect: sentimentalism, she claims, came to fruition in the wake of the Second Great Awakening and often acted as a domestication of the radical Methodist theologies and practices that rose to prominence during that time. The Second Great Awakening, in other words, left a powerful mark on literature. By drawing our attention to the specifics of Methodist revivals and doctrines, Stokes pries open the monolithic category of “evangelical Christianity” to reveal a whole set of competing denominations, doctrines, and worship practices; the women who wrote these novels knew the competition, engaged in it, and – for the most part – won. They made what was radical and rare seem staid, traditional, and safe, even as they transformed the religious landscape.

In revealing the kinds of competition at stake, Stokes's book implicitly urges a greater engagement on our part with religious studies, particularly the specificities of religious doctrine and denominational histories. Many of us know something about the rise of Methodism and we are aware that the Second Great Awakening occurred, but these transformative events of the nineteenth century are not signal moments in most American literary histories. Yet Methodism and the Second Great Awakening are not news to scholars of religion. In fact, when I recently discussed The Altar at Home with several historians of American religion, they did not know much about sentimentalism or sentimental novels, but they did know a great deal about the religion covered in this book. One commented that the book could push much further into the divisions within Methodism: The Altar at Home focusses on high-pitched, emotional frontier Methodism, but there was also an eastern, genteel, high-class Methodism gradually settling into place. Such a comment suggests that in doing religion and literature, we as a whole might need to treat this interdisciplinary work as requiring much more of us – perhaps the mastery of two disciplines, or at least a closer familiarity with religious studies and longer conversations with historians of religion. As Stokes's book demonstrates, denominations matter. Different sects have different practices and beliefs, and most of the divisions were well known to those who lived amid these differences.

But that is, in effect, to argue that literary studies needs to be more historically attuned, which might seem odd at a time when history seems to govern so much of what happens in literature and religion. In fact, for books in religion and literature there seems to have arisen a standard structure with three distinguishing features. First, our works are organized chronologically; chapters proceed through time. Second, the introduction and often the opening chapter do heavy historical lifting. And third, these openings set the context and create the environment in which a scholar then explores the way religious ideas or religious cultures have shaped literature. So, just to give the examples of three important books that I admire, in Culture and Redemption, Tracy Fessenden moves chronologically and, I would argue, gets increasingly “literary” as she goes; in Preaching and the Rise of the American Novel, Dawn Coleman has two great opening chapters on the social status of the novel and the social status of preaching before she then does literary readings of several individual novels; and in The Altar at Home, Claudia Stokes, moving chronologically, does her most historical work early and her most literary work late, turning from a wide mix of writings and cultural formations in the first chapters to individual close readings of particular writers, novels and poems in the later chapters.Footnote ²

Nor are these examples alone. Consider, for instance, two other important examples: Amy Hungerford's Postmodern Belief and John McClure's Partial Faiths, both of which signaled and helped initiate the turn to religion in American literature.Footnote ³ In Postmodern Belief, Hungerford explains that she will first lay out the situation of religious change in postwar America, then she will read texts in light of that broad cultural assessment. She moves chronologically, and each individual chapter repeats the same structure, beginning with historical context and ending with close readings. John McClure does much the same: “Before turning to the fiction itself,” he writes, “I want to sketch out a map of the broader postsecular movements with which it is engaged.” And lest it appear that I am identifying a certain sort of organization in order to set my own work in relief, I can throw in my own book, Sympathetic Puritans, as well. I, too, frontload history and explain broad religious contexts before turning to more and more close readings, all the while moving chronologically forward.Footnote ⁴ This seems to be the way of things. So one question for McClure and Hungerford and Stokes and Coleman and Fessenden and myself – and for anyone else interested in the study of American literature and religion – would be this: when we finish drawing what McClure calls a “map” of broader movements before turning to our close readings, have we already completed the main substance of our work, or is our real work about to begin? Is the map the point? That is, are we as literary scholars ill-content to let the importance of close readings rest on their own merits without tying them always to some bigger, broader claim about cultural history? And if we must tie close readings back to cultural history, then are all the intricate interpretations we do nothing more than illustrations of a point already made in the introduction?

On this point, let me relate another brief anecdote. At Washington University in St. Louis, I have conducted a reading group in religion and literature composed of scholars from English, religious studies, and history. In one meeting, a historian commented that he does not look to literary scholars to learn about history (this should surprise no one, and it confirms what Eric Slauter wrote in his important essay on the “trade gap” between history and literature); rather, this historian looks to literary scholars for better readings of particular texts.Footnote ⁵ That is what he appreciates most, he claimed, when reading the work of a literary scholar. While I do look to literary scholars to learn about history as well as other matters, it is true that some of the best moments in several recent works arrive when the scholar dives into a text and examines it closely. I find Hungerford's book most successful, for example, when she turns to particular texts – to poems and novels by Ginsberg, DeLillo, and Robinson. But that raises again this question of organization in our books: can we only turn to those readings if we have already done our history? And if our books all begin in big historical claims and contexts, then end with some close readings, what are we emphasizing with our work? Or to put this point a bit differently, if people stopped reading our books after chapter 1, will they have read far enough?

In some cases that would be true – and unfortunate – though not in all or even most cases, thankfully, and I want to use the Altar at Home to explain why. Its close readings, I believe, do something that I think more scholarship in literature and religion should emulate. When Stokes discusses the relationship between the Second Great Awakening and sentimental literature, she shows not just that the rise of Methodism shaped women writers and not just that it created an audience for sentimental works; she also shows that women writers shaped and changed religion. They helped make hymns a basic part of worship, for example, and they wrote many of those hymns themselves, so that women's theological interpretations of Scripture became public parts of the liturgy (often for the first time). Moreover, the Arminian Methodist theology became so widely accepted in and through this literature that it came to be seen as traditional, conventional, and even in some ways old-fashioned – though it was in fact a rather innovative theological position. Stokes's opening chapters state that claim, but I would posit that this back-and-forth between literature and religion appears most strikingly when she moves from the Second Great Awakening to her chapter on the sentimental poetry of the Mormon writer Eliza P. Snow. Focussing on one poem in particular (now one of the most famous and important hymns in Mormonism), Stokes shows not just that Snow used sentimental forms to make Mormonism acceptable to a wider population, but also that her use of sentimental forms dramatically reshaped Mormonism. Official Mormon doctrine now accepts (largely because of Snow and this poem) the existence of a Divine Mother.

The point here is that studies in religion and literature often do not move in this direction, and often because they frontload history and get to literature last. Usually, it seems to me, scholarly works in religion and literature make arguments that move from religion to literature. To take the example of Hungerford again (only because her book has been so influential in spurring further work in literature and religion): she often transitions not just from a broader cultural condition of religion to individual works, but also from an individual's biographical history with religion to an interpretation of that author's work. Literature comes last. I appreciate Hungerford's book for many reasons, but I do not think she follows through on her claim that literature speaks back to religion, or that it functions as a kind of theology. Rather, it seems to me that she forgoes analyzing the possible ways that literature reshapes religion, focussing instead on how it reflects or is shaped by wider cultural movements. What Stokes provokes us to do, I think, is to reimagine the relationship between religion and literature not as causal (from religion to literature), but as mutually constitutive. We could use more work like that.

Finally, in reviewing recent studies in American literature and religion, I think that scholars have become obsessed with one thing in particular: authority. And it makes me wonder if, in fact, it has been authority all along that turned literary scholars back to a study of religion. The secularization theory, after all, posited that religion had lost its authority; when, after 9/11, we found out that it hadn't, we turned to religion to understand its grip on those who seemed not just to believe certain doctrines privately, but to shape their whole lives (both public and private) according to these doctrines and to the modern prophets and preachers of their faith. In other words, religious authority turns out to be a real thing with real effects on the world. And in at least three of the books I have already mentioned, it is this sense of authority that seems to structure much of the argument. Coleman begins by revealing the cultural authority of preachers in nineteenth-century America and contrasting it with the lack of authority fiction writers had; she then uses that disparity to explain how and why writers attempted to accrue for fiction the kind of authority already granted to preaching. So, too, Stokes focusses on the way that sentimental writers gained religious authority through sentimental techniques. As she writes in her introduction, “This book aims to show that the redistribution of gendered religious authority underlies sentimental literature at every turn.”Footnote ⁶ Hungerford, finally, reveals the same concern. Her book is largely about the way writers used the aura of religion to invest literature with cultural authority at a time post-1960 when it seemed that literature was losing its social status. So one thing I would ask of future studies in religion and literature would be to consider authority on its own terms – as the end and aim of a study in religion and literature. I want to know, in short, what we mean by “religious authority,” how that authority relates to other kinds of authority in the world, what form it can take at different times, and, above all, how literature functions in the accruing, dispersing, critiquing, or reconfirming of religious authority.

These are a few thoughts on American literature and religion based on some recent studies and proffered in the hopes of spurring further work, discussion, and investigation. Such thoughts can be summarized with three primary questions that I think it will be worth considering in the future. (1) In our “turn to religion,” have we in fact turned enough to those scholars who have been studying religion all along? Do we need more familiarity with religious studies to do studies of religion and literature well? If there is a “trade gap” with history, what does the trade look like between literature and religious studies? (2) What is the role of history in our study of religion and literature, and can we think of a legitimate way to structure a book on religion and literature that does not necessarily move chronologically forward or frontload historical context? And when we do look to broader contexts for our close readings, how do we speak about literature and religion as mutually constitutive, rather than seeing the former as always shaped by, or reflecting, the latter? Finally, (3) what is the role of authority in our various studies of religion and literature? How much does that guide our interest in religion and literature, what do we mean by “religious authority,” and what might an explicitly foregrounded – perhaps definitional – study of such a subject look like?