Reviews for Family Transformed Religion, Values, And Society in American Life

The average rating for Family Transformed Religion, Values, And Society in American Life based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-04-29 00:00:00 Debbie Haas In his 1966 work Religion and the American Mind, which proved a critical touchstone for many who followed, Alan Heimert proposed that the ideas and rhetoric of evangelical Calvinists, rather than Enlightenment influenced clergy and secular thinkers, laid the groundwork for the American Revolution. A student of Perry Miller, to whom Religion and the American Mind was dedicated, Heimert broke with his tendency to present Congregationalist thought as an abstracted unity. Instead he posited a fundamental division within Protestantism in the American colonies following the enthusiasms of the Great Awakening, one which transcended denominational allegiances and quarrels. The “two armies, separated and drawn up in battle array,” as Jonathan Edwards put it in 1742, divided colonial society between Old Lights and New. While Liberal clergy embraced rationalist ideas of discerning God’s will through nature, and individuals working out their salvation with reason, Evangelicals turned inward, seeking confirmation of God’s irresistible Grace through the emotional crucible of conversion experience. Of the two, Heimert concluded that it was the Evangelical movement’s implicitly democratic understanding of God as emerging through the People, and the optimistic Evangelical understanding of America as separated from Europe and imbued with the millennialist promise of the establishment the Lord’s kingdom, which underpinned emergent American democracy and nationalism. Liberal clergymen, meanwhile, preached a God which no matter how tolerant and reasonable was nevertheless a “sovereign from whom the prerogatives and privileges of the clergy descended.” Heimert’s thesis inverted the mainstream view established by Vernon Parrington decades before, that it was the intellectual shaking off of bible black Calvinist dogmatism, and emergence into the light of the universalist thought of the Enlightenment, which formed the backdrop of the colony’s rebellion. His controversial conclusion was founded on a method which proved to be equally controversial. A former officer in the Army’s Far East Psychological Warfare section, Heimart approached the ideas in sermons which formed his primary base of evidence not as philosophical propositions, but as propaganda meant to move its audience to feelings, attitudes and action within a certain “imaginative universe.” Proceeding in the mode of literary interpretation, seeking to “reading not between the lines but, as it were, through and beyond them” Heimert observed that despite the individualistic, equalitarian implications of Locke’s often quoted writings, they were most often invoked by Liberal clergy for the conservative purpose of reinforcing the unequal social position of the colonial elites, of which they many were members. It was transgressive, populist evangelical rhetoric which formed the worldview of the lower classes, a worldview within which the rebellion gathered strength, “not so much the result of reasoned thought as an emotional outburst similar to a religious revival.”

Review # 2 was written on 2018-08-20 00:00:00 Sukhbir Basra "Alan Heimert in a very large and important work, Religion and the American Mind which is very important, we are going to go into this, studies it in all the literature from about 1750 to about 1800 or shortly thereafter and finds it dominant, in fact, when he was studying the literature of the 1850’s, 60’s, 70’s, he found that he could not understand it without going back to this idea of America as God’s Israel. As a place to build the kingdom of God. To establish a social order in terms of Gods Law." ~ RJ Rushdoony "Motives of Discovery and Exploration" in American History to 1865