Creative curriculum leadership Book

Cosmos Crumbling is an interesting study of religion and reform in the early 19th Century US. Abzug's main point is that religious understandings of the cosmos and the moral order of the universe were central to the views and actions of temperance, health, Sabbatarian, and anti-slavery reformers. In some cases, profound religious experiences corresponded with conversion to a cause such as anti-slavery. In other cases, reformers reimagined religious texts and ideas to support their positions on reform. For example, the Grimke sisters examined the Bible and concluded that God had made man and woman equal in moral responsibility, legitimating their quest to assert women's roles in the abolition movement. Finally, many reformers put political and social issues in terms of a cosmic war. Temperance reformers did this to reinforce their authoritarian tendencies, but Garrison formulated slavery as the national sin which had to be purged before God punished America with a race war. Putting things in terms of a cosmic war between good and evil alienated some, but rallied many passionate supporters to these causes. This framework of sin and punishment recalled the Puritan jeremiad and framed the way many Americans wrestled with the suffering of the Ciivl War. Strangely enough, behavioral psychologists have found recently that such appeals to emotion and grand moral visions are often more effective than appeals to self-interest or rationality. On the other hand, they risk fostering radicalism and division within the movements.

The figures who emerge most starkly from this book are William Lloyd Garrison and the Grimke sisters. I frankly found both of them to be inspirational and admirable figures, if a bit nuts. Garrison's writing on slavery is absolutely amazing, and his moral stance clear and uncompromising. He envisioned America as a bad place because of its accommodation of slavery and called out the gap between its professed values and the reality of slavery. The Grimke sisters were equally admirable for seeing through the circumstances of their upbringing to embrace both women's rights and abolitionism. It's always a bit of a mystery as to why some people rise above the moral paradigms of their times. Abzug helps us understand these outliers by linking their transformations to their radical reconsiderations of the cosmos and religion.