The essays comprising There Before Us leave one wondering how the discipline of literary studies, not to mention the discipline of history, so long denied the deep importance of religion in American life and literature. This fascinating collection contests the clichéd narrative of nineteenth-century American secularization, which, by portraying religion as an anachronistic form of belief that becomes less and less relevant as modernity progresses, has discouraged academic attention to the persistence of religious ideas and concerns. There Before Us does not, to be clear, contend that orthodox forms of religion persist unchanged in modern American literature and culture. As Andrew Delbanco explains in the afterword, this is a book about “post-religious writing,” a literature reflecting the “pursuit of religious experience” in a culture that no longer contains “an authoritative doctrine to explain when, or if, the sought has been found” (241–242). With the exception of Katherine Clay Bassard's essay on the poetry of Francis E. W. Harper, the contributors to this volume focus on the continued relevance of religion in the work of authors who have abandoned Christian certainties.

The subjects of this study share an interest in re-establishing a sense of the sacred in the wake of religious doubt. Barbara Packer describes how Ralph Waldo Emerson, along with Henry David Thoreau and other mid-century seekers, experienced antislavery reform as sacred community untainted by Christian practices that no longer accorded with their own experiences. John Gatta demonstrates that Thoreau's understanding of the sacred was not straightforward “romantic wilderness worship,” but rather an awareness that, using the tools of higher criticism and developmental science, nature could be read as a sacred text (32). Although he located the divine in “the interactive harmony between nature and the human imagination” rather than in the Bible, Thoreau retained a sense of the need to carefully interpret divine revelation (47). Roger Lundin argues that, rather than rejecting her religious heritage, Emily Dickinson re-appropriated religious language and concepts in order to describe a form of belief that could encompass doubt. Lundin describes how Dickinson founded belief on the eschatological hope that what the “heart desires will some day come to pass,” rather than on knowledge of facts or assent to doctrine (89). Harold Bush's essay describes the relationship of freethinkers including Mark Twain and Robert Ingersoll to the development of a northern civil religion that envisioned the nation as a sacred entity. Gail McDonald's strained attempt to connect modernist poets to the Social Gospel provides a final instance of the relocation of the sacred. According to McDonald, the modernist project of Ezra Pound, H. D., and T. S. Eliot to “make God (or the gods) new is an effort to retain the category of divinity in human thought, to keep the sacred alive and meaningful, to posit a world not utterly divorced from heaven” (214).

Other essays suggest that religious questions and categories persist despite the loss of religious certainty and the decline of biblical authority. Michael Colacurcio's reading of Herman Melville's short stories shows that, despite his lack of faith in a benevolent and omnipotent God, Melville continued to grapple with the problem of evil. While, according to Colacurcio's account, Melville might have accepted the Marxist belief that only the opiate of religion prevented the oppressed from rising up against human injustice, he never substituted a political concern with justice for his fundamentally religious concern with evil. Melville chose to leave unoccupied the space once filled by doctrinal answers to fundamentally theological questions. In his study of William and Henry James, M. D. Walhout suggests that liberal society needs to define its own version of sainthood in order to embody a comprehensive liberal doctrine of the good. He finds such a figure to be implicit in William James's evaluation of the worth of sainthood according to its support of the liberal virtues of freedom and equality. Walhout identifies Milly Theale of Henry James's The Wings of the Dove (1902) as one of the liberal saints who, he writes, remind “us of the moral limits of society even as they point beyond them” (193).

There Before Us fails to live up to the promise of its expansive subtitle. Despite Lawrence Buell's quick mention of Wendell Berry, this is a book about the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and, despite Bassard's essay, the volume as a whole takes no interest in those variants of “religion, literature, and culture” that involve traditional religious belief. This clarification should not be confused with complaint, however, since this book's value stems from its focus on a particular, agnostic strain of American literary culture. By illuminating the creative efforts of men and women who combined religious doubt with an abiding fascination with the sacred and with a continued interest in fundamentally religious questions, these essays reveal much about the fortunes of religion in a de-Christianized American literary culture. There Before Us should convince both historians and literary scholars of the need to look beyond the notion of secularization to recognize the continued relevance of the religious even after the abandonment of explicitly Christian belief.