Most immediately, John Fea's The Way of Improvement Leads Home is a biography of the eighteenth-century Presbyterian preacher best remembered today because of his detailed diary account of life on a Virginia plantation. Fithian (1747–1776), who was a tutor for Southern aristocrat Robert Carter III's children during 1773–1774, recorded observations about plantation life, slavery, and religion that are still of interest to students of late colonial America.

But Fea's book is also a biography of the American Enlightenment in the years immediately preceding the Revolution. Fea sees Fithian as representative of the struggle that many mid-eighteenth-century Americans went through to accommodate two worldviews, Christianity and the Enlightenment, that converged on some points but wildly clashed on others. In examining the life of this “ordinary farmer,” Fea—contrary to the somewhat reified analyses of the Enlightenment offered by Henry May or Peter Gay—wishes to underscore the claim that, at least on this side of the Atlantic, “an Enlightenment life was complex and complicated” (7).

The story of Fithian's short life can be told quickly. Born in southwestern New Jersey—in the Cohansey (or “Cohansie,” as Fithian invariably spelled it) River area, a region that he loved and pined for during his times away from it—Fithian underwent a conversion while in his late teens that moved him away from following in his father's yeoman steps. He studied at a Presbyterian academy in nearby Deerfield and then moved on to the College of New Jersey (Princeton) at the late age of twenty-three. Upon graduation, Fithian returned home for a year and then headed south to the Carter plantation. In 1775 and 1776, Fithian stumped as an itinerant Presbyterian preacher in Virginia and Pennsylvania, married, joined the New Jersey state militia when war erupted, and died of dysentery in October 1776, less than a year after his marriage.

What is not so easily told are the paradigmatic tensions in the American Enlightenment that Fithian's life displayed. The Enlightenment ethos, for example, championed a nonparochial cosmopolitanism. The enlightened person was supposed to wean himself of loyalty to specific places and climes in order to become a citizen of the world. But Fithian, reflecting the values of the rural culture that birthed and reared him, never managed to liberate himself from a deep love for his own little neck of the world in Cohansey. Whenever he left it—either to improve his mind at the College of New Jersey, to follow his religious calling by preaching in the Shenandoah and Susquehanna valleys, or to enlist in the New Jersey militia—his homesickness was sometimes nearly unbearable.

Then there is the tension between the Enlightenment's fidelity to this world—its exploration and celebration through natural philosophy and its improvement through a struggle for the political rights discovered by reason—and Presbyterianism's fidelity to the other world of God's Kingdom. The two worldviews espoused different understandings of humankind's proper “home,” and Fithian was sometimes torn between his loyalties to both. On the one hand, he preached God's Kingdom from the itinerant's pulpit. On the other hand, he wholeheartedly supported the war with England because he believed it to be a struggle for enlightened values such as liberty. But he also tried to hedge his bets by believing that the Revolution was divinely inspired.

Perhaps the most painful tension exemplified by Fithian involves the uneasy relationship between his Enlightenment-bred progressivism and his Presbyterian sense of human fallenness. A central tenet of the Enlightenment was the perfectibility of humanity through the education of reason and the cultivation of virtue—or what can generically be called “self-improvement.” Fithian was enough of a child of the Enlightenment to take this principle seriously. But it did not sit well with the Presbyterian story of human depravity and the necessity for an eschatological cleansing of creation. As Fea notes, “Philip sought the Enlightenment with every ounce of his being and yet wholeheartedly rejected its most fundamental teachings about where human history was heading. This was the great paradox of an eighteenth-century enlightened life” (213).

Readers primarily interested in the history of Christianity in late colonial America will find Fea's analysis of orthodoxy and the Enlightenment especially interesting. Fea resists oversimplifying the occasionally compatible but usually uneasy relationship between the two. Because of the hold of Christianity on colonial culture, the Enlightenment never gained a secure foothold in the popular mind (although in the first fifty years of the young Republic, Enlightenment-inspired deism gave Christianity a run for its money). But the influence of the enlightened ethos on the Christian worldview was nevertheless profound, giving rise, as Fea writes, to “compromises between world citizenship and local attachments, and between Christianity and the modern age” that eventually culminated in the emergence of American civil religion (215, 214). Thanks to Fea's careful study, the Presbyterian who called Cohansey home becomes one of our “best windows into the way the Enlightenment in America was lived” (215).

Author Fea, who teaches at a college geographically close to the Upper Susquehanna Valley where Fithian traveled and preached in mid-1775, writes of his subject with eloquence, insight, and obvious affection (he refers to Fithian by his first name throughout the book). The book is well documented, with 35 pages of finely printed endnotes, and is illustrated. One of the most fascinating illustrations is a chalk drawing of Fithian, apparently drawn toward the end of his life. The sketch is disconcerting, revealing a young man with intense, wide-open eyes and determined, pursed lips. It is the face of someone accustomed to living with unresolved, and perhaps unresolvable, loyalties.