Abstract
This essay explores the relationship between politics and religion in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s nineteenth-century antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). More specifically, the article aims to show that although Stowe’s novel breaches the ‘wall of separation between church and state’ written into the American constitution by demanding that Christian values determine government policies, her work ‘sacralizes’ the political realm only to a limited extent. Uncle Tom’s Cabin does not condone the ‘sacralization’ of politics that, as Emilio Gentile’s work on political religion points out, imbues political institutions and representatives with religious qualities: Stowe produced neither a political religion that can be denounced as totalitarian, nor the civil religion for which the United States has been presented as a model.1 Whereas Gentile’s work highlights the dangers of donning politicians and political institutions with a religious aura, Stowe’s efforts to introduce religious values into the public sphere do not aim to imbue the political domain and its representatives with a religious halo. On the contrary, Stowe’s distrust of, and distance from, politics bolster her religious qualms to consider anything earthly truly sacred. At the same time, Stowe undermines fears about the relationship between politics and religion best expressed by Hannah Arendt, who often complained that Christianity’s two-world perspective undermined Christian political involvement.2
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Notes
[Calvin Colton,] Abolition a Sedition, by a Northern Man (Philadelphia, 1839), 29.
Patrick Gueniffey, ‘suffrage’, in François Furet and Mona Ozouf (eds), Dictionnaire critique de la révolution française (Paris, 1988), 571–81
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Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York, 2000).
Keith Michael Baker, ‘Representation Redefined’, in idem, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990), 224–51
Patricia Hollis, ‘Pressure from without: An Introduction’, in idem (ed.), Pressure from without in Early Victorian England (London, 1974), 1–26;
John L. Brooke, ‘Consent, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere in the Age of Revolution and the Early American Republic’, in Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson and David Waldstreicher (eds), Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, 2004), 207–50.
Eugene Charlton Black, The Association: British Extraparliamentary Political Organisation 1769–1793 (Cambridge, MA, 1963)
Charles Tilly, ‘Britain Creates the Social Movement’, in James E. Cronin and Jonathan Schneer (eds), Social Conflict and the Political Order in Modern Britain (London, 1982), 21–51.
See for an excellent historiographical critique, Peter Stamatov, ‘The Religious Field and the Path-dependent Transformation of Popular Politics in the Anglo-American World, 1770–1840’, Theory and Society 40/4 (2011), 437–73.
Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven and London, 1989), 125–8; Stamatov, ‘The Religious Field’.
For the Dutch case see Annemarie Houkes, Christelijke vaderlanders: Godsdienst, burgerschap en de Nederlandse natie, 1850–1900 (Amsterdam, 2009).
For more on the concept, see Roger V. Gould, Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune (Chicago, 1995), 13–15.
Johann N. Neem, Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA, 2008); Stamatov, ‘The Religious Field’.
Henry Jephson, The Platform: Its Rise and Progress, vol. 1 (New York and London, 1892), 4.
Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York and Oxford, 1994)
Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815–1860, 2nd rev. edn (New York, 1997), 21–37.
Elizabeth Heyrick, Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition, or, An Inquiry into the Shortest, Safest, and Most Effectual Means of Getting Rid of West Indian Slavery (Boston, 1838 [1824]), 18 (original emphasis).
Clare Midgley, Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns 1780–1870 (London and New York, 1992). Also see Eduard van de Bilt’s chapter in this volume.
Charles Tilly, ‘Introduction to Part II: Invention, Diffusion, and Transformation of the Social Movement Repertoire’, European Review of History 12/2 (2005), 307–20; and idem, ‘Britain Invents the Social Movement’ for the relationship between the passing of the Reform Bill and the agitation in the years prior to passage.
Gillian M. Doherty and Tomás O’Riordan, ‘The Campaign for Catholic Emancipation, 1823–1829’, in Donnchadh Ó Corráin and Tomás O’Riordan (eds), Ireland, 1815–70: Emancipation, Famine and Religion (Dublin, 2011), 129–42, accessible through the Multitext project in Irish History, University College Cork, Ireland, http://multitext.ucc.ie/d (retrieved March 2011)
Fergus O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation: Daniel O’Connell and the Birth of Irish Democracy 1820–30 (Dublin, 1985).
Thomas Wyse, Historical Sketch of the Late Catholic Association of Ireland, vol. 1 (London, 1829), 228–9.
Peter J. Wosh, Spreading the Word: The Bible Business in Nineteenth-century America (Ithaca and London, 1994), 63.
Ibid.; Candy Gunther Brown, The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789–1880 (Chapel Hill and London, 2004)
David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (Oxford and New York, 2004)
Judith Wellman, Grass Roots Reform in the Burned-over District of Upstate New York (New York and London, 2000); Neem, Creating a Nation of Joiners.
Michael P. Young, Bearing Witness against Sin: The Evangelical Birth of the American Social Movement (Chicago and London, 2006); Stamatov, ‘The Religious Field’.
Richard John, ‘Taking Sabbatarianism Seriously: The Postal System, the Sabbath, and the Transformation of American Political Culture’, Journal of the Early Republic, 10/4 (1990), 517–67
Bertram Wyatt-Brown, ‘Prelude to Abolitionism: Sabbatarian Politics and the Rise of the Second Party System’, The Journal of American History 58/2 (1971), 316–41.
James Bratt, ‘Religious Anti-Revivalism in Antebellum America’, Journal of the Early Republic 24/1 (2004), 65–106 (68).
William Ellery Channing, ‘Remarks on the Disposition Which Now Prevails to Form Associations and to Accomplish All Objects by Organized Masses’ (1829), The Works of William E. Channing, 6 vols (Boston, 1841), I, 281–332 (290).
See also Bratt, ‘Religious Anti-Revivalism’; idem, ‘From Revivalism to Anti-Revivalism to Whig Politics: The Strange Career of Calvin Colton’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 52/1 (2001), 63–82.
Frank Carpenter, ‘William Ellery Channing’, Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography (Unitarian Universalist Historical Society, 1999–2011). Available at http://www25-temp.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/williamellerychanning.html (retrieved March 2011).
Robert Michels, Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie. Untersuchungen über die oligarchischen Tendenzen des Gruppenlebens (Leipzig, 1911).
[Calvin Colton,] Protestant Jesuitism by a Protestant (New York, 1836), 51.
On the debate on reform politics and the tyranny of the majority, see Kyle G. Volk, ‘The Perils of “Pure Democracy”: Minority Rights, Liquor Politics, and Popular Sovereignty in Antebellum America’, Journal of the Early Republic 29/4 (2009), 641–79.
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Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Civil Society: 1750–1914 (Basingstoke and New York, 2006), 1–6.
Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion, trans. George Staunton (Princeton, NJ, 2006), 31.
Stanley Stowers, ‘The Concepts of “Religion“, “Political Religion” and the Study of Nazism’, Journal of Contemporary History, 42/1 (2007), 9–24 (17).
Michael Walzer, ‘Liberalism and the Art of Separation’, Political Theory, 12/3 (1984), 315–30.
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© 2013 Eduard van de Bilt
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van de Bilt, E. (2013). De-sanctifying Affairs of State: The Politics of Religion in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). In: Augusteijn, J., Dassen, P., Janse, M. (eds) Political Religion beyond Totalitarianism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291721_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291721_5
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