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Sky God: Remaking the Heavens and Divinity in the Nineteenth-Century United States
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 August 2022
Abstract
In the early nineteenth century, the “cosmological revolution” reached Americans with no special education or astronomical expertise. New ideas about the scale and nature of the cosmos, some of which had been gestating among elites for centuries, forced ordinary people to reevaluate traditional associations between higher places, higher beings, and higher meaning. As the old “heavens” became more like the modern “space”—larger, emptier, less morally alive—God and his kingdom became more abstract. This trend often mattered to people in ways that esoteric doctrine did not. It divided Americans. A placeless God and “state of being” afterlife found readier acceptance among educated people accustomed to thinking in abstract, immaterial terms and pursuing abstract, immaterial goods. Among nonintellectuals, the new heavens caused unsettling debates between people, and within them, about the locality and reality of higher things. Well before better-remembered disputes over Darwinism and geology, these cosmological debates opened foundational divisions in popular ideas, as some laypeople reluctantly accommodated the new heavens while others turned to defiant cosmic conservatism. On balance, Americans moved toward reformed conceptions of God and heaven, rebuilding divinity in the image of the new cosmos.
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- Copyright © 2022 by The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture
References
Notes
1 A common assumption of the historical literature on heaven has been that the heavens derive their “higher” meaning from the ideas we project onto them. On the ability of natural phenomena to shape human history and ideas, see Nash, Linda, “The Agency of Nature or the Nature of Agency?” Environmental History 10, no. 1 (2005)Google Scholar.
2 On material Christianity, see Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Robert Orsi, History and Presence (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2016). On nature veneration, see Brett Grainger, Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019); Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1956); Catherine L. Albanese, Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
3 Ptolemy's estimate of the universe's size was large by the standards of his time.
4 On Bruno's cosmology as a cause of his condemnation, see Alberto A. Martinez, Burned Alive: Bruno, Galileo and the Inquisition (London: Reaktion, 2018). The traditional view is that Bruno's inquisitors focused, instead, on his theology and politics.
5 Copernicus refused to speculate on the extent of the outer heavens. Into the nineteenth century, study of the astronomy of the distant cosmos, beyond our solar system, was unfashionable because of the perceived difficulty of reaching observational, as opposed to speculative, conclusions. See Michael J. Crowe, Modern Theories of the Universe: From Herschel to Hubble (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1994), 146–49.
6 Thomas Dick, The Christian Philosopher (Philadelphia, 1833 [1823]), 193; A Very Remarkable Account of the Vision of Nathan Culver (Boston, 1795), American Antiquarian Society; A Remarkable Dream Respecting Eternal Things (Bennington, VT, 1790), American Antiquarian Society. On visionaries and their cosmological literalism, see Douglas L. Winiarski, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
7 On growing estimates of the stellar distance see Crowe, Modern Theories, 31–35.
8 Richard La Rue Swain, What and Where Is God? A Human Answer to the Deep Religious Cry of the Modern Soul (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 16.
9 William Derham, Astro-Theology (London, 1715), xxvi; William Whiston, Astronomical Principles of Religion (London, 1717), 25. Derham and Whiston applied to the heavens a “physico-theological” approach first popularized by the naturalist John Ray in The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691). Derham's Astro-Theology went through fourteen editions by 1777. On the survival of the empyrean among teachers into the eighteenth century, see Jeffrey Burton Russell, Paradise Mislaid: How We Lost Heaven and How We Can Regain It (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 21.
10 James Ferguson, Astronomy Explained upon Sir Isaac Newton's Principles, 2nd ed. (London, 1757 [1756]), 1–5. Astronomy Explained went through at least twelve English editions in the late eighteenth century, then two American editions after U.S. independence.
11 John Bigelow, ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1868), 85; Benjamin Franklin, “Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion” (1728), available at https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-01-02-0032. Franklin's pragmatism was forthright: “I think it seems required of me . . . to pay Divine Regards to SOMETHING.”
12 John Adams, Diary 1, May 27, 1756. Available at https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive. See also John Quincy Adams's “Report to Congress on the Smithsonian Fund” (January 26, 1839).
13 Michael J. Crowe and Matthew F. Dowd, “The Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Antiquity to 1900,” in Douglas A. Vakoch, ed., Astrobiology, History, and Society: Life Beyond Earth and the Impact of Discovery (Berlin: Springer, 2013), 22, 24. Galileo, Descartes, and Newton had entertained the idea of infinite inhabited worlds but dismissed it as speculation, neither provable not disprovable.
14 Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (London, 1880 [1794]), 44.
15 Ethan Allen, Reason, the Only Oracle of Man (New York, 1836 [1784]), 14, 12, 49. Allen refers to Exodus 33:23, in which God descends in a cloud pillar and says to Moses, “I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen.” All biblical quotations are from the King James Version.
16 Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New-York (New Haven, 1821), 388; Barlow quoted in Jill Lepore, The Story of America: Essays on Origins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 67. For Mather's concessions to a less personal God, see Cotton Mather, The Christian Philosopher (London, 1721).
17 William Paley, Natural Theology (London, 1802), 287; Keith Stewart Thomson, Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 195–96.
18 Samuel Goodrich, Recollections of a Lifetime, vol. 1 (New York, 1857), 267–71.
19 Dick, Christian Philosopher, 49. On Dick's popularity in the United States, including among working people, see William J. Astore, Observing God: Thomas Dick, Evangelicalism, and Popular Science in Victorian Britain and America (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 2001), ch. 6–7.
20 Dick, Christian Philosopher, 52
21 Dick, The Philosophy of a Future State (New York, 1829 [1828]), 203, 66. On ethical living as “the defining trait of true religion in popular print,” see T. J. Tomlin, A Divinity for All Persuasions: Almanacs and Early American Religious Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 103. Dick offered no quarter to traditionalists. “The person who has an opportunity of making himself acquainted with the science of nature and of contemplating the wonders of the heavens in their true light, and who does not find his views of the Creator expanded, and his religious emotions elevated by such studies, has reason to call in question the nature and sincerity of his devotional feelings.” Dick, Christian Philosopher, 20.
22 O. M. Mitchel, The Astronomy of the Bible (New York, 1863), 54, 115, 208, 189. Dick was equally critical of Mosaic miracle-mongering: “[T]here is a more grand and impressive display in the Works of Nature, than in all the events recorded in the Sacred History.” Dick, Christian Philosopher, 35.
23 William Leitch, God's Glory in the Heavens (London, 1862), 21; Dick, Philosophy of a Future State, v. Leitch, a longtime Presbyterian minister, taught theology at Queen's College in Kingston, Ontario. In funeral sermons, trained clergy often felt compelled to direct mourners’ attention away from heaven's exact location and attributes. See, for example, Thomas Cleland's 1808 eulogy for Jane Horton (American Antiquarian Society) or Samuel Benedict's 1863 “Blessed Dead Waiting” (Macon, GA.)
24 Leitch, God's Glory, v–vi; George Bush, Heaven: A Sermon (London, 1850); Henry Harbaugh, Heaven: Or, an Earnest and Scriptural Inquiry into the Abode of the Sainted Dead, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, 1851 [1848]), 28.
25 William Ellery Channing, “The Great Purpose of Christianity” (sermon delivered in Boston, 1828), in The Works of William E. Channing (Boston, 1846).
26 David Magie “Heaven's Chief Attraction” (sermon delivered in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, 1840), American Antiquarian Society.
27 Harbaugh, Heaven, 33, 21. Heaven had been published in seventeen editions by 1861. Harbaugh went on to write two additional volumes on heaven.
28 Harbaugh, Heaven, 30, 33.
29 Harbaugh, Heaven, 48, 86, 61.
30 Jacob Abbott, The Corner-Stone, or a Familiar Illustration of the Principles of Christian Truth (Boston, 1839), 22.
31 Elihu Palmer, Principles of Nature (New York, 1830 [1801]), 198; Goodrich, Recollections, 362. “The common people largely ignored the mechanical universe being constructed by Descartes and Newton,” Ronald Numbers writes. “In fact, the gap between natural philosophers and the public may have been widening.” Ronald Numbers, Science and Christianity in Pulpit and Pew (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 18.
32 Marion Barber Stowell, Early American Almanacs: The Colonial Weekday Bible (New York: B. Franklin, 1977), xi.
33 William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 199, 193; Donald Zochert, “Science and the Common Man in Antebellum America,” Isis 65, no. 4 (1974). Zochert's study focuses on Milwaukee newspapers printed between 1837 and 1846. For an announcement of Bessel's parallax measurement, see Illinois Free Trader, July 28, 1843. For an essay on cosmic scale, see Vermont Telegraph, October 2, 1839. For recollections of the 1833 Leonid meteor shower, see Alexandria Gazette, November 14, 1836. On increasingly matter-of-fact coverage of celestial events, see Zochert, “Science”; Peter J. Thuesen, Tornado God: American Religion and Violent Weather (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 52; Sara S. Gronim, “At the Sign of Newton's Head: Astronomy and Cosmology in British Colonial New York,” Pennsylvania History 66 (1999).
34 Gilmore, Reading, 172, 263, 176, 270, 199, 281–82. On falling paper prices and expanding book publishing circa 1800, see Eric and Sylvia Jones, “Book Industry,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, ed. Joel Mokyr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). A corollary effect of cheap print was that the heavens had more competition for the attention of ordinary people.
35 David Jaffee, “The Village Enlightenment in New England, 1760–1820,” William & Mary Quarterly 47, no. 3 (1990); Ellwood Patterson Cubberley, Public Education in the United States: A Study and Interpretation of American Educational History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), 174.
36 William H. McGuffey, The Eclectic First Reader (Cincinnati, 1836), 20, 122; John H. Westerhoff, McGuffey and His Readers: Piety, Morality, and Education in Nineteenth-Century America (Nashville: Abingdon, 1978), 105. On the decline of religious content in schoolbooks, see John A. Nietz, Old Textbooks (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1961), 53–54. Images from editions of The New England Primer printed by Edward Draper (Boston, 1777) and Samuel Woods (New York, 1818).
37 Amos Pettingill, A View of the Heavens (New Haven, CT: 1826), 7; M. R. Bartlett, Young Ladies’ Astronomy (Utica, NY: 1825), 6. These lines echoed eighteenth-century deist arguments.
38 On trends in biblical illustration, see Paul C. Gutjahr, An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777–1880 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 59–76. For an example of near-total reliance on earthly imagery from the Near East, see the “MATTER-OF-FACT views of places mentioned in Scripture, as they appear in the present day,” compiled in Robert Sears, Two Hundred Pictorial Illustrations of the Holy Bible, 5th ed. (New York, 1841).
39 [Samuel Goodrich], Peter Parley's Universal History: On the Basis of Geography (Boston, 1837), 52; “Heaven,” in John Low, ed., The New and Complete American Encyclopedia (New York, 1805); “Heaven,” in Samuel F. Bradford, ed., The Cyclopædia, 1st American ed. (1806). Like other American encyclopedias of the period, these were adapted from British originals.
40 Gutjahr, American Bible, 10; Thomas Chalmers, A Series of Discourses on the Christian Revelation, Viewed in Connection with the Modern Astronomy (New York, 1817), 46. On Age of Reason's popularity see also Jay E. Smith, “Thomas Paine and The Age of Reason's Attack on the Bible,” The Historian 58, no. 4 (1996). Benjamin Franklin was converted to deism after reading unpersuasive attacks on it.
41 Paine, Age of Reason, 2, 26, 22.
42 Paine, Age of Reason, 39; Lyman Beecher, Autobiography (New York, 1865), 43; “Auto-biography of Rev. Asahel Moore,” Baptist Memorial and Monthly Chronicle (August 1844); Tomlin, Divinity, 68. On the popular reach of philosophical ideas in this period, see also the memoir of Nathaniel Bowditch, printed in Bowditch's translation of Laplace's Mécanique Céleste (Boston, 1839).
43 “The Idea of Heaven,” American Baptist Magazine (October 1833). On the broader long-term loss of “concrete symbols” that had made religion “real and substantial” to “the half-educated mind,” see John Fiske “The Idea of God” (Part I), The Atlantic Monthly, November 1885.
44 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Henry Reeve, trans., Francis Bowen, ed. (Cambridge, MA: 1863 [1835]), 400. On believers’ passive concessions to more scientific and secular outlooks, see Peter Harrison, “Science and Secularization,” Intellectual History Review 27, no. 1 (2017).
45 Stephen Marini, “Hymnody as History: Early Evangelical Hymns and the Recovery of American Popular Religion” Church History 71, no. 2 (2002); Gilmore, Reading, 151; Zilpha Elaw, Memoirs (London, 1846), 46; Vision of Nathan Culver; The Vision and Wonderful Experience of Jane Cish (Newburyport, MA, 1793), American Antiquarian Society; John Pulsipher, Journal vol. 1 (March 1835–October 1874), Juanita Pulsipher Brooks Papers, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah. On the Leonids, see, for example, interviews with Lillie Baccus (Arkansas vol. 1), Sylvester Brooks (Texas vol. 1), Virginia Newman (Texas vol. 3), and Abraham Jones (Alabama), all published as part of the Federal Writers’ Project, U.S. Works Progress Administration, Library of Congress. Martin Luther King's mentor, scholar Benjamin Mays, observed with regret that “no idea is so dominant in the Spirituals as the belief that God will make things right in Heaven.” Benjamin Mays, The Negro's God as Reflected in His Literature (Boston: Chapman and Grimes, 1938), 24.
46 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co., 1903), 199; Du Bois, “A Litany of Atlanta,” The Independent, October 11, 1906. After the Atlanta race riot of 1906, Du Bois wondered why black people had not seen that the “God of the fathers” was dead, then reluctantly backtracked: “Thou art not dead, but flown afar, up hills of endless light, thru blazing corridors of suns, where worlds do swing of good and gentle men, of women strong and free—far from . . . this shameful speck of dust!” On frustration with otherworldliness, see, for example, Mays, Negro's God, 14; Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (The Christian Century, June 12, 1963).
47 Parley P. Pratt Jr., ed. The Autobiography of Parley Parker Pratt (Chicago, 1888 [1874]), 45–46; Cincinnati Sun, March 27, 1843, reprinted in Henry Jones, Modern Phenomena of the Heavens (New York, 1843); John R. Kelso, Deity Analyzed: In Six Lectures (New York, 1883), 104. Kelso refers to Genesis 1:7 and 7:11. Phelps, the best-known proponent of a concrete heaven, eventually half-folded under the pressure of other educated writers, and defended her “little book” in pragmatic terms, as something useful to the poor and especially “simple, domestic women.” See Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, “The World Invisible,” Pt. 2, Harper's Bazaar, May 1908.
48 John B. Kennerley, “Our Father's House: A Sermon for Novitiates,” The Intellectual Repository, August 1, 1865. On social marginalization of traditional cosmology, see Adam Jortner, Blood from the Sky: Miracles and Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017), esp. 84; Gronim, “At the Sign.” On Catholics, see, for example, John William Draper, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (New York, 1874), 359–64; on Mormons, “Fanaticism,” United States Gazette, February 11, 1831; on revivalists, Bernard Whitman, A Lecture on Popular Superstitions (Boston, 1829), 22. For examples of progressive cosmological language see also Bush, Heaven; Mitchel, Astronomy of the Bible; Harbaugh, Heaven.
49 Henry D. Thoreau, The Maine Woods (Boston, 1864), 39; Fletcher S. Bassett, Legends and Superstitions of the Sea and of Sailors (Chicago, 1885), 8; Goodrich, Recollections, 364, 426
50 Dick, Christian Philosopher, 198–200.
51 Mark 24:29–30; Jones, Modern Phenomena, 42.
52 William Scales and Benjamin Gale, quoted in Susan Juster, Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 157–58.
53 William A. Alcott, Forty Years in the Wilderness of Pills and Powders (Boston, 1859), 4; Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT, 1989), 89; Russell Streeter, Latest News from Three Worlds: Heaven, Hell and Earth (Boston, 1832). For a more sympathetic account of revivalists’ heaven see James B. Finley, Autobiography (Cincinnati, 1853), 324–25.
54 Autobiography of Peter Cartwright, the Backwoods Preacher (Cincinnati, 1856), 35, 275, 51–52. On revivalism as a counterculture fueled by defiance of orthodox critics, see Winiarski, Darkness Falls, 281. Joseph Smith and other Mormon leaders also struggled to suppress new visionaries within the church.
55 Exodus 33:11; Isaiah 40:22–23; Joshua 10:12–13.
56 The language of “heaven” was no more or less rhetorical than that of “God.” When people used terms like “for heaven's sake” or “for God's sake”—however reflexively—their rhetoric gestured to substantial underlying ideas.
57 Hatch, Democratization, 5, 10. On class divisions and trust in visionary experience, see also Mark S. Schantz, Piety in Providence: Class Dimensions of Religious Experience in Antebellum Rhode Island (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).
58 Genesis 1:14; Exodus 9:23–26, 16:1–15, 24:15–16, 32:14; Psalm 18. Charles Grandison Finney had his closest encounter with God in a vision of Sinai “amidst its full thunderings.” Finney, Memoirs (New York, 1876), 193.
59 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Introduction, in Charles Beecher, Pen Pictures of the Bible (New York, 1855); John 20:17; Acts 1:9; Luke 21:25; 1 Thessalonians 4:17. Jesus also tells his followers, in a verse widely known and cited in antebellum America, “In my Father's house are many mansions. . . . I go to prepare a place for you” (John 14:2). Cosmological reformers rebutted heavenly literalism with 1 Corinthians 2:9: “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.”
60 Jones, Modern Phenomena, 2; Whitman, Popular Superstitions, 60.
61 Bush, Heaven, 1–4, 7. On popular emotional attachments to a traditional heaven, see also Harbaugh, Heaven, 61.
62 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar (Boston, 1873 [1868]), 68–69, 73, 141; Dwight Moody, Heaven: Where It Is, Its Inhabitants, and How to Get There (Chicago, 1885 [1880]), 63–64; Pew Research Center, “U.S. Public Becoming Less Religious,” November 3, 2015, https://www.pewforum.org. Phelps continued: “Eternity cannot be . . . the great blank ocean which most of us have somehow or other been brought up to feel that it is, which shall swallow up, in a pitiless, glorified way, all the little brooks of our delight” (140).
63 Borg, Marcus, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time (San Francisco: Harper, 2001), 7–11Google Scholar. On literalism's role in undermining belief in heaven in particular and Christianity in general, see Russell, Paradise Mislaid, 21–24, 32–33.
64 For religious traditionalists in nineteenth-century America, the new cosmology could easily be more unsettling than the new evolutionary biology. Whereas the biological challenge was essentially historical, concerning the creation, the cosmological challenge also concerned the present question of God's personal care and the future promise of a heavenly home.
65 Clifford, William Kingdon, “The Influence upon Morality of a Decline in Religious Belief,” in Lectures and Essays by the Late William Kingdom Clifford, ed. Stephen, Leslie and Pollock, Frederick (London and New York, 1879), 389Google Scholar; Foster, Randolph S., Theism: Cosmic Theism; Or the Theism of Nature (New York and Cincinnati, 1890), viiGoogle Scholar.