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The Religion of Democracy
  • Published: 21 April 2015
  • ISBN: 9780698192249
  • Imprint: PEN US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 432
Categories:

The Religion of Democracy

Seven Liberals and the American Moral Tradition

Formats & editions
EBook
21 Apr 2015
Tr. Paperback
15 Jan 2017
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A history of religion’s role in the American liberal tradition through the eyes of seven transformative thinkers

Today we associate liberal thought and politics with secularism. When we argue over whether the nation’s founders meant to keep religion out of politics, the godless side is said to be liberal. But the role of religion in American politics has always been far more nuanced and complex than today’s debates would suggest and closer to the heart of American intellectual life than is commonly understood. American democracy was intended by its creators to be more than just a political system, and in The Religion of Democracy, historian Amy Kittelstrom shows how religion and democracy have worked together as universal ideals in American culture—and as guides to moral action and the social practice of treating one another as equals who deserve to be free.

The first people in the world to call themselves “liberals” were New England Christians in the early republic, for whom being liberal meant being receptive to a range of beliefs and values. The story begins in the mid-eighteenth century, when the first Boston liberals brought the Enlightenment into Reformation Christianity, tying equality and liberty to the human soul at the same moment these root concepts were being tied to democracy. The nineteenth century saw the development of a robust liberal intellectual culture in America, built on open-minded pursuit of truth and acceptance of human diversity. By the twentieth century, what had begun in Boston as a narrow, patrician democracy transformed into a religion of democracy in which the new liberals of modern America believed that where different viewpoints overlap, common truth is revealed. The core American principles of liberty and equality were never free from religion but full of religion.

The Religion of Democracy re-creates the liberal conversation from the eighteenth century to the twentieth by tracing the lived connections among seven thinkers through whom they knew, what they read and wrote, where they went, and how they expressed their opinions—from John Adams to William James to Jane Addams; from Boston to Chicago to Berkeley. Sweeping and ambitious, The Religion of Democracy is a lively narrative of quintessentially American ideas as they were forged, debated, and remade across our history.
  • Published: 21 April 2015
  • ISBN: 9780698192249
  • Imprint: PEN US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 432
Categories:

Praise for The Religion of Democracy

Jill Lepore, author of Book of Ages and The Secret History of Wonder Woman:
"The Religion of Democracy is a stunning history of the opening of the American mind. Through a shrewd study of seven subtle thinkers, Kittelstrom explores the place of belief, faith, and virtue in the intellectual traditions that lie behind American liberalism. A fascinating, important, and resonant book."

Daniel Walker Howe, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848:
"Amy Kittelstrom here pours new life into intellectual history for scholars and concerned citizens, whether they are religious or not. She traces the commitments of present-day civic liberalism--free inquiry, cultural pluralism, public education, and compassion for the disadvantaged--not to the rise of secularism but to the Christian theological liberalism of New England at the time of the American Revolution. She finds these origins in what she terms, appropriately, an American Reformation."

David D. Hall, Harvard University; author of A Reforming People:
"Turning the pages of this remarkable book, I found myself moved not only by its intellectual range and the lucidity of Kittelstrom's prose but also by its central theme, the emergence in nineteenth-century America of an ethical commitment to democracy's highest moral and practical possibilities--in effect, a 'religion of democracy.' An illuminating story, for our times as well as for what it tells us about the past."


Jill Lepore, author of Book of Ages and The Secret History of Wonder Woman:
"The Religion of Democracy is a stunning history of the opening of the American mind. Through a shrewd study of seven subtle thinkers, Kittelstrom explores the place of belief, faith, and virtue in the intellectual traditions that lie behind American liberalism. A fascinating, important, and resonant book."

Daniel Walker Howe, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848:
"Amy Kittelstrom here pours new life into intellectual history for scholars and concerned citizens, whether they are religious or not. She traces the commitments of present-day civic liberalism--free inquiry, cultural pluralism, public education, and compassion for the disadvantaged--not to the rise of secularism but to the Christian theological liberalism of New England at the time of the American Revolution. She finds these origins in what she terms, appropriately, an American Reformation."

David D. Hall, Harvard University; author of A Reforming People:
"Turning the pages of this remarkable book, I found myself moved not only by its intellectual range and the lucidity of Kittelstrom's prose but also by its central theme, the emergence in nineteenth-century America of an ethical commitment to democracy's highest moral and practical possibilities--in effect, a 'religion of democracy.' An illuminating story, for our times as well as for what it tells us about the past."