The Testimony of the Spirit, the Decline of Calvinism, and the Origins of Restoration Rational Religion

The mid-seventeenth century turn to moralism in English Protestant theology – exemplified here by ‘Ignorance’ in Bunyan's Pilgrim's progress – involved a clear rejection of the Calvinistic doctrine of the ‘internal testimony’ of Scripture. The upshot was the emergence of a religious impulse that emphasised the salience of a ‘rational account’ of Scripture's credibility. The shift is conventionally traced through Richard Hooker, William Chillingworth and the Cambridge Platonists. Hooker was, however, more Calvinist and Chillingworth more Laudian than has been recognised. The Cambridge Platonists and their ‘latitudinarian’ successors emerged from and were shaped by puritan culture.

Tornado God

One of the earliest sources of humanity’s religious impulse was severe weather, which ancient peoples attributed to the wrath of storm gods. Enlightenment thinkers derided such beliefs as superstition and predicted they would pass away as humans became more scientifically and theologically sophisticated. But in America, scientific and theological hubris came face to face with the tornado, nature’s most violent windstorm. Striking the United States more than any other nation, tornadoes have consistently defied scientists’ efforts to unlock their secrets. Meteorologists now acknowledge that even the most powerful computers will likely never be able to predict a tornado’s precise path. Similarly, tornadoes have repeatedly brought Americans to the outer limits of theology, drawing them into the vortex of such mysteries as how to reconcile suffering with a loving God and whether there is underlying purpose or randomness in the universe. In this groundbreaking history, Peter Thuesen captures the harrowing drama of tornadoes, as clergy, theologians, meteorologists, and ordinary citizens struggle to make sense of these death-dealing tempests. He argues that, in the tornado, Americans experience something that is at once culturally peculiar (the indigenous storm of the national imagination) and religiously primal (the sense of awe before an unpredictable and mysterious power). He also shows that, in an era of climate change, the weather raises the issue of society’s complicity in natural disasters. In the whirlwind, Americans confront the question of their own destiny—how much is self-determined and how much is beyond human understanding or control.

Arnoldian Secularism

This chapter explores how Matthew Arnold’s major essays of the 1860s and 1870s took up the racialized readings of religion that Müller had opposed and used them to construct a liberal counter-paradigm for thinking about religion, race, and self-cultivation. In texts such as Culture and Anarchy (1869), Arnold calls humankind’s religious impulse “Hebraism,” a racial inheritance of the Semitic peoples that can contribute to the development of a many-sided selfhood if it is balanced against the Greek genius for art and knowledge, the Celtic genius for beauty and sentiment, and so on. Yet Arnold’s Hebraism also becomes subtly overdetermined in that it represents simultaneously one particular side of human life and an ideal of one-sidedness that positively rejects any larger pluralist framework. This is the ambiguity at the heart of this study: how race-based religion comes to figure a narrow energy that pluralism wants to incorporate, but also fears as a competitor.