Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War by Christopher Grasso (review)

Grasso also works with a fascinating cast of little-known but not-quite-ordinary men and women, such as Richard Hildreth, a bookish Utilitarian philosopher; Ernestine Rose, whose incendiary assault on the fundamentals of the Christian faith and passionate defense of women’s rights sparked a riot at the 1853 Hartford Bible Convention; and a host of others who read Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason and the Bible, attended philosophical lectures and revival meetings, joined churches and utopian communities, and, above all, preached, discussed, debated, and published their endlessly shifting views on natural philosophy and revealed religion. Literary critics interested in the genealogy of secularism traced in important recent books such as John Lardas Modern’s Secularism in Antebellum America (U of Chicago P, 2011) or Emily Ogden’s Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism (U of Chicago P, 2018) may find less of use in Skepticism and American Faith. Neither a product of democratization, as Nathan Hatch famously asserted (Democratization of American Christianity [Yale UP, 1989]), nor “conceived in doubt,” as Amanda Porterfield has recently challenged (Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation [U of Chicago P, 2012]), “American styles of Christianity,” Grasso concludes, were “forged in the foundry of culture” (17), on the iron of faith and the hammer of skepticism.