Early American Religion in a Postsecular Age

A survey of the journal early american literature from the mid-1980s to today reveals a curious phenomenon: religion disappears from the tables of contents during the 1990s. Beginning in 2000, religion returns with measured consistency, culminating with a special issue devoted to “methods for the study of religion” in 2010 (Stein and Murison). This resurgence of interest in religion, not only as a topic of inquiry but also as an analytic category, coincides with the “religious turn” that for the past decade has shaped literary studies and the disciplines intersecting with it. In the wake of 9/11 and the political revival of the religious right, Americanists were surprised at the intense and exceptionally religious nature of the United States. Given the religious and political inflections of the war on terror to follow, the academic study of religion could not remain the “invisible domain” that it had been in American and literary studies throughout the 1990s (Franchot). The context demanded a critical response, particularly because the largely liberal and secular academy could not understand the visible fervor of the religious right at the turn of the twenty-first century. Across disparate fields and disciplines, scholars and critics have revisited religion as a serious topic of intellectual inquiry. Over the past decade, work on religion has focused on how literary forms mediate between the human and the divine, the role of a transcendent belief system in relation to political or social formations, and the conjunction between spirit and matter, the supernatural and the natural. In reflecting on such connections between the secular and the sacred, scholars also elicited a concomitant revision of the narrative of secularization that had long impeded the study of religion by defining modernity through religion's absence, irrelevance, and inevitable replacement by competing paradigms.