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Agency, the Idea of Agency, and the Problem of Mediation in America's God and Secularism in Antebellum America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 September 2015

Sonia Hazard
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A common faith swept the country. According to Mark Noll's now-famous thesis, early republican and antebellum America was characterized by an ideological synthesis of evangelical religion, republican political theory, and common sense epistemology. Noll calls it “the Protestant consensus.” John Modern largely agrees. In Modern's telling, antebellum America was mired in the same entanglement of piety, politics, and epistemology. But in lieu of the civic language of consensus, Modern describes his formation as an “atmosphere,” a kind of conceptual cloud-hanging so thickly in the air that antebellum Americans inhaled it with every breath. This pervasive atmosphere is what Modern means by “the secular.”

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Church History , Volume 84 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 610 - 615
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Copyright © American Society of Church History 2015 

A common faith swept the country. According to Mark Noll's now-famous thesis, early republican and antebellum America was characterized by an ideological synthesis of evangelical religion, republican political theory, and common sense epistemology.Footnote 1 Noll calls it “the Protestant consensus.” John Modern largely agrees. In Modern's telling, antebellum America was mired in the same entanglement of piety, politics, and epistemology. But in lieu of the civic language of consensus, Modern describes his formation as an “atmosphere,” a kind of conceptual cloud-hanging so thickly in the air that antebellum Americans inhaled it with every breath. This pervasive atmosphere is what Modern means by “the secular.”Footnote 2

For both Noll and Modern, one of the most defining aspects of this conceptual formation—whether going by the name “the Protestant consensus” or “the secular”—is that those who lived in and through it imagined the human subject as autonomous, self-conscious, and fundamentally free. This ideal subject knows the world in a direct way, is surrounded by a range of meaningful choices, and possesses the capacity to choose among them.Footnote 3 Through common sense epistemology, people could know the world; through republican politics, change the world; and through evangelical piety, win salvation in the afterworld. Americans were agents. Modern and Noll agree that this buoyant view of human agency rose to dominance in the antebellum period, becoming so naturalized as to appear as a self-evident truth, taking hold “at the level of intuitive reason” and “at the level of affect and practice.”Footnote 4

A crucial difference, however, divides the two accounts. Modern critiques Noll for accepting agency at face value, that is, for failing to recognize that agency was a story, one among many stories that, in Modern's words, “evangelicals told themselves in order to be themselves.”Footnote 5 According to Modern, agency was rather a contingent discourse that Noll erroneously elevates to an essential property of the antebellum subject.Footnote 6 Modern counsels that to understand why agency discourse became so convincing to antebellum Americans—to understand how this particular idea of agency came to take hold so strongly in their thoughts, feelings, and practices—historians need to better account for its mediation. Mediation refers to the role of material contexts, practices, things, and institutions—in short, a whole set of historical contingencies—that inflect the production and circulation of all ideas. In Modern's view, Noll perilously ignores that mediation. Modern charges that in America's God, “The play of ideas happens independently from the bodies and contexts these ideas inhabit, that is, from the conditions that mediate those ideas . . . Noll forestalls an exploration of the circumstances that have enabled the story he is telling to become so persuasive.”Footnote 7 Modern here argues that his and Noll's accounts make competing claims on the ontological status of the agency idea—the claim of that idea on material reality. Noll's Americans really possessed agency to their cores, whereas Modern's Americans just thought, felt, and said that they did, because they were conditioned to do so.Footnote 8

I. America's God

The opening question to put to Noll is then to what extent is Modern's critique fair: does America's God sufficiently attend to the forces that mediate the production and circulation of ideas, to “the bodies and contexts these ideas inhabit”? The answer is complicated. Yes and no. First, the yes. One distinctive quality of Noll's practice of intellectual history is that he refuses to linger for long in the minds of its actors. In his excellent analysis of the protestant “epidemic of organization” in the 1820s and 1830s, for instance, Noll embraces the nitty-gritty, less glamorous side of doing history, assiduously accounting and mapping to reconstruct the networks in which these ideas circulated.Footnote 9 As an example, Noll counts brick-and-mortar churches. By midcentury, there were 34,476 churches, compared to only 18,417 post offices.Footnote 10 Noll maps the spread of voluntary societies, which, he argues, “reveal most clearly the connecting tissue that evangelicals contributed to the new nation.”Footnote 11 Noll charts the paths of Methodist circuit riders, whose intrepid struggle with American geography constituted “the circulatory system of an energetic national body” and “a system of ligaments tying together the people of a nation.”Footnote 12 I want to call attention here to Noll's commitment to describing the concrete, material network through which ideas were distributed and calcified. The “agents” involved in spreading ideas like agency included ecclesial institutions, the sweat of circuit riders, and printed objects, among other material bodies and things.Footnote 13 One could read these key sections and reasonably come away with the sense that the power of the protestant consensus lies in the strength of these material bonds and structures. These are the mediating forces that made possible the spread of agency as an idea.

Now for the no. If Noll does account, at least at times, for the mediations of the material world—for connecting tissues, systems of ligaments, bodies, and contexts—a second question emerges: why, then, does Noll neglect to make clear the allied point that “agency” is a constructed discourse and not an essential nature of the subject? Part of what drives Modern's critique is Noll's reluctance, whether conscious or not, to keep distinct agency's two registers, that is, as an idea with a history and as an essential property of the subject. Modern is correct that Noll occasionally invokes human agency as a fundamental human truth in his narrative. In the midst of an argument against the social control thesis, for instance, Noll states breezily that he prefers an explanation that “allows religious actors both more self-awareness and more agency.”Footnote 14 But why would the historian be content with an historical method celebrating the very perspective that his subjects themselves were ideologically promoting? As with any ideological discourse, agency discourse has its own patterns of inclusion and exclusion. It redistributes what is and what is not considered an “agent.” Is Noll too closely reproducing the approach of his subjects here?

Hard conclusions are difficult to draw out of these ambiguities. Modern sees Noll as epitomizing the type of American religious history in which subjects are figured as fully aware agents, and parts of Noll's work support this reading, crystallized in his remark about the need for “more self-awareness and more agency.” But I think it is likely that Noll made that particular comment rather offhandedly. Maybe we should regard it as not the conceptual key to the book, nor a deliberate historiographical position, but simply indicative of Noll's anticipation of objections from those American religious historians—and there are many of them—who more ardently defend personal agency. In the majority of cases in America's God where Noll invokes “agency” as a term, he does so not in the sense implied by many American religious historians, that is, as an inviolable reserve of the human subject to make religion creatively and authentically in the face of harsh external structures. More often, Noll invokes the term with far less moral weight, to make the more practical claim that religion exerted “agency” in the realm of politics, and not only the other way around.Footnote 15

Given these complexities, I would like to ask Noll to clarify his stance on agency in his historical practice. Professor Noll, were evangelicals right in occupying the epistemic sweet spot between a gloomy Calvinism and the incursions of a paranoid poststructuralism? Were they—and are we—free, unfettered, autonomous agents? Does each of us possess a bounded self-sovereignty for which we are uniquely accountable? Can we truly, fully, and directly know the world, and act in it, without the influence of worldly mediations? The real question here is: are you a liberal?

II. Secularism in Antebellum America

It is worth asking of John Modern the same question about mediation he posed to Noll. What forces mediate ideas in Secularism in Antebellum America? What are the “bodies and contexts” that make the idea of agency possible, pervasive, and persuasive? Secularism in Antebellum America is a capacious intellectual achievement characterized by richly drawn descriptions and brilliant analyses of a multitude of bodies, things, and contexts. In a key chapter on evangelical mass media practices, for instance, Modern glimpses the secular in the “viral” proliferation of print, as the American Tract Society commissioned an army of colporteurs to grid the country and stuff a tract in the palm of every man, woman, and child in America.Footnote 16 He goes on to discuss other various antebellum technologies including the penitentiary, the telegraph, and the memorable New Motive Power. Modern argues that these media and technologies penetrated deep into the consciousness of antebellum Americans—that is, they mediated consciousness—all the while, perversely, seeming to empower them as free, unmediated agents. These examples are wrought with the rich phenomenological detail that characterizes the best of lived religion scholarship.

But what continues to nag me about Modern's portrayal of these mediating “bodies and contexts” is how he presents them as already secular by 1851—the year that provides the setting for Secularism in Antebellum America. We jump right in the middle of things, when tracts, telegraphs, and prison walls are already dissolved in the secular's “metaphysical solvent” and already “feeding back” into preexisting secular circulations.Footnote 17 Through these material instantiations we glimpse the secular in the midst of its unremitting, well-oiled operations, but never the secular in the moments of its creation. It is as if secularism demands to be both the precondition and the effect of these technologies and media: “Evangelical media practices,” Modern tells us, “did not simply generate the conditions of ‘secular America’ but were themselves conditioned by the conceptual atmosphere of secularism.”Footnote 18 For Modern, media and technologies are both producers and products of the secular, but they are not mediators in the same manner as, say, Noll's circuit riders. In the vaporous secular atmosphere, there are few hard surfaces of history that birth and distribute ideas.

So who, or what, has “agency” for Modern? We know that it is not human subjects, at least not in the way American religious historians typically understand them.Footnote 19 But the answer does not lie in material conditions, either. While at first blush it appears that Modern makes a materialist intervention into the agency question—in his demands for an accounting of the empirical foundations of “bodies and contexts”—these material conditions do not make the secular, for they are already expressions of the pervasive secular atmosphere. Bodies and contexts appear in his book as signs through which we can glimpse the conceptual secular behind and before them. What, then, has agency in Secularism in Antebellum America? Concepts do. Ultimately the agent of the secular is the concept of the secular itself.Footnote 20

Agency retains a complicated role. Ironically, in narrating the historical emergence of the idea of agency, Noll reveals the real agentive capacities of “tissues,” “ligaments,” and other mediating material forces. Modern, by contrast, indicates the priority of material “bodies and contexts” for sustaining the conceptual “atmosphere” of agency, but allows the idea to become the real maker of that history. In a word, Noll gives us material agents and ideal agency, whereas Modern gives us ideal agents and material agency. These represent two answers to the demanding methodological question of how to approach agency, when agency is at once a contingent idea emerging within American religious history and a normative property necessary to the telling of that history. Though they answer that question differently, together Noll and Modern draw the contours of an implicit problem in American religious history—a problem that we may wish to take up explicitly in the futures of our narratives of the American religious past.

References

1 By the 1820s, this republicanism became liberal republicanism, with a stronger emphasis on the individual. Mark A. Noll, America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University, 2005), 209–212.

2 For atmosphere, see John Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2011), 45–46, 113, 117, 255. Whether articulated as “the secular” or “the Protestant consensus,” both Modern and Noll tell stories of a prevailing religious consensus with little sectarian conflict. (Their accounts are also largely white, male, and classless.) These choices seem dissonant in a historiography of antebellum religion in which religious diversity—sometimes articulated in the language of pluralism or democratization—remains the dominant paradigm. Their tendency to emphasize resonance rather than difference is partly attributable to their common emphasis on the constitutive importance of centers of production, privilege, and power. While neither author denies that people on the margins were able to resist or respond to ideological hegemony, both maintain that power mattered. Tracy Fessenden is another major thinker who argues for an expansive form of antebellum protestantism that subsumes denominational distinctions as it infuses political and civic life. For her analysis of “nonspecific Protestantism” see Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2006), 61.

3 Noll, America's God, 95.

4 Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America, 74, 11.

5 Modern sometimes calls it an “imperial discourse.” Ibid., 12, 73.

6 Ibid., 8, 22n.51, 114, 117.

7 Ibid., 73–74.

8 Modern would resist my equation of “the secular” as an ideology or set of ideas that veils reality. Throughout Secularism in Antebellum America, Modern insists that secular discourses have ontological power. “Secularism . . . cannot be approached as an ideological ruse. It neither deceived nor promulgated inaccurate representations of reality. On the contrary, secularism has been part and parcel to the very constitution of the real. For in supplying both the ground and ingredients of the freedoms enacted in the name of true religion, secularism did not distort reality as much as it provided a particular kind of justification for it.” Ibid., 9.

9 Noll, America's God, 198.

10 Ibid., 200–201.

11 Ibid., 196. Cf. “connecting tissue” in Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America, 282.

12 Noll, America's God, 196. Cf. Modern's recurrent use of “circulation,” e.g. Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America, 26–33.

13 In his attention to the material bodies and things that mediate ideas, Noll's work invites conversation with actor-network theory, a body of literature not often embraced by church historians. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (New York: Oxford University, 2005).

14 Noll, America's God, 189. Modern singles out this line in his critique; see Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America, 73.

15 See, for example, the section “Protestant Agency” in Noll, America's God, 213–214.

16 Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America, 112.

17 For “metaphysical solvent,” see ibid., 54, 91. For “feedback,” see ibid., 113–116.

18 Ibid., 113.

19 Modern tells us that whether or not human agency exists “was and remains an open question.” Ibid., 7.

20 In one particularly lush part of the book, ripe for close reading, Modern offers readers a conceptual map of how these atmospheric circulations operate: “[T]he freedoms of the secular age necessarily depend upon how subjects are generated by way of words that loom on the horizon and that have nothing, initially, to do with those subjects. These words possess ontological status. They assume social force in the form of concepts. These concepts, in turn, become instantiated in technics, practices, and words relating to them. And so on and so forth.” To me this map encapsulates the puzzle of Modern's secularism, that when Modern talks about “circulation” he actually means something that is conceptually linear: words become concepts, which later become technics and practices. It is the words and concepts that are primary, anterior to practices and technologies. Ibid., 285.