1. Shain, Barry Alan, The Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 322–28Google Scholar. Many historians are also readdressing the religious question. Hutson, James T., Religion and the Founding of the American Republic (Library of Congress/University Press of New England, 1998Google Scholar), Kuehne, Dale S., Massachusetts Congregational Thought 1760–1790, (Columbia MO:, University of Missouri Press, 1996Google Scholar), and Hatch, Natahan O., Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989Google Scholar).

2. Lipset, Seymour Martin, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), pp. 17–20Google Scholar. Samuel Huntington follows Lipset in refurbishing Tocqueville's view of American exceptionalism. “The United States is the only country in the world in which a majority of the population has belonged to dissenting Protestant sects.” Huntington argues that the English Puritan revolution was “the single most important formative fact of American history” for it shaped the moral passion “that has powered the engines of political change in America” (Huntington, , American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981], pp. 14, 154Google Scholar). Quoted in Young, James P., Reconsidering American Liberalism: The Troubled Odyssey of the Liberal Idea (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), p. 20Google Scholar.

3. Diggins, John P., The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism (New York: Basic Books, 1984), p. 341Google Scholar. Unlike his close friend, Mark Twain, who satirized religious practice, and by implication religious belief, Howells did neither.

4. Sandoz, Ellis, ed., Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730–1805 (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1991), p.369Google Scholar. While Shain suggests that the American sects’ originally thought the essential liberty was that which permitted the free worship and strict moral practice of the sects themselves, by the Revolutionary era the demand for religious liberty had advanced to include individual right to conscience and complete religious tolerance as well (Myth of American Individuality, pp. 31,59Google Scholar).

5. Zuckert, Michael, The Natural Rights Republic: Studies in the Foundation of the American Political Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), pp. 150–52Google Scholar.

6. Berns, Walter, “Religion and the Founding Principle,” in The Moral Foundations of the American Republic, ed. Horwitz, Robert H. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977), p. 165Google Scholar.

7. Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America, ed. Mayer, J. P. (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), p. 293Google Scholar.

8. Ibid., p. 47.

9. Hamilton, Alexander, Madison, James, and Jay, John, The Federalist Papers, ed. Cooke, Jacob (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), pp. 58,59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. Barber, Benjamin R., “An American Civic Forum: Civil Society between Market Individuals and the Political Community,” in The Communitarian Challenge to Liberalism, ed. Frankel, Ellen Paul, Miller, Fred D. Jr and Paul, Jeffrey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 272Google Scholar.

11. Commager, Henry Steele, The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1880's (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), pp. 41–45Google Scholar.

12. While more sympathetic to aspects of religion than the Progressives, William Graham Sumner sought a purely scientific sociology in which religion made no rational contribution to knowledge and action, as it had for the Founders. Sumner, William Graham, On Liberty, Society, and Politics: The Essential Essays, ed. Bannister, Robert C. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, Inc., 1992), pp. 161,331–39Google Scholar.

13. Croly, Herbert, The Promise of American Life (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1989 [1909]), pp. 17, 18, 23, 371, 373, 377, 384Google Scholar

14. Young, , Reconsidering American Liberalism, pp. 3–4, 13–21Google Scholar. Later in his intellectual career Croly began to explore the seemingly necessary place of religion in American liberalism: “Liberalism and Christianity are fighting a losing battle with a secularism which is indifferent both to the humanitarianism of the liberals and the personal salvationism of the traditional Christianity.” Nevertheless, his own turn to religious thought combined modern psychology with spiritual abstractions similar to the new age religions of the twentieth century (Stettner, Edward A., Saping Modern Liberalism: Herbert Croly and Progressive Thought [Lawrence, KS: University of Knasas Press, 1993], pp. 152,153,98–99Google Scholar).

15. Croly was committed to the “liberation of democracy” from the “moralists of self-repression.” Croly warns of the dangers of the distractions which “pious instructors pluck from the grave in order to terrify it withal.” He argues true Christianity is not allied with Elihu Root's doctrine of restraint: ’Modern psychology, like Christianity, affords no sufficient excuse for a morality of repression. It conceives both individual and social life as fundamentally active. …Since life consists essentially in activity, a wise system of educational discipline…should seek primarily to release and develop rather than dam up the instinctive sources of action in human nature” (Promise of American Life, p. 421Google Scholar). “If only sexual attraction were made the excuse for candid, mutual curiosity rather than reciprocal illusion” (ibid., p. 429).

16. Lewis, Sinclair, Elmer Gantry (New York: Harcourt Brace Janovich, 1970 (1927), pp. 38,60–61Google Scholar. When the Progressives wrote, liberalism was identified with economic individualism, hence they called themselves Progressives and not liberals. FDR reclaimed the proud description of liberal for the Progressives. For this reason, Progressive liberalism seems now the most appropriate designation of contemporary liberalism.

17. These criticisms are made repeatedly by Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, not to mention, Robert Ingersoll. In Elmer Gantry, an enlightened minister reflects on the usefulness of his training: “what training had he…in this trade of Professional Goodness. He was supposed to cure affliction called vice. But he had never encountered vice. …He was supposed to bring peace to mankind. But what did he know of the forces which cause wars, personal or class or national; what of drugs, passion, criminal desire; of capitalism, banking labor, wages, taxes; international struggles for trade, munition trusts, ambitious soldiers? He was supposed to comfort the sick. But what did he know of sickness? How could he tell when he ought to pray and when he ought to recommend salts? He was supposed to explain to troubled mankind the purposes of God Almighty…But which God Almighty? Professor Bruno Zechlin had introduced Frank to a hundred gods besides the Jewish Jehovah” (pp. 229–30). In The “Genius” (1915), Dreiser argues that Christianity contributes to “small mindedness,” sexual repression, and social and political conservatism. Its only function is to protect those weak souls unable to face the turbulent, mysterious reality of material nature. Throughout the Francis Cowperwood trilogy, Dreiser argues that great and creative men require constant sexual conquests to nurture their vitality (The Financier, The Titan, The Stoic).

18. Hough, Robert L., The Quiet Rebel: William Dean Howells as Social Commentator (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1959), p. 83Google Scholar.

19. Parrington, Vernon Louis, Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920,3 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1930), 2: 245Google Scholar.

20. Federalist, pp. 29–36, 349Google Scholar.

21. Howells, William Dean, Annie Kilburn (New York: The Library of America,1989 [1919]), pp. 830–833Google Scholar.

22. Bennett, George N., The Realism of William Dean Howells. 1889–1920 (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1973), pp. 15,137–140Google Scholar.

23. Kermit Vanderbilt draws attention to Howells's alternating praise of some religious sects for their “Christian humanitarianism,” and his praise for others recognizing the necessity of strict orthodoxy. To illustrate the later, he condemns “the tendency of modern liberalism to ignore the chief of the fallen angels (ignoring the permanence of sin).” Describing the Shaker village he visited one summer Howells found “it pleasant, after the generalizing of the pulpits, to have the sins of one's fellow men frankly named and fully rebuked.” Vanderbilt argues that A Modern Instance captures Howells's fear of the decline of Puritan faith. In any case in Vanderbilt's view, Howells's interest in religious questions was universal. Vanderbilt, Kermit, The Achievement of William Dean Howells: A Reinterpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 18,50–61Google Scholar. I believe Howells considered the Shakers nearer the ideal because their communitarian life was both orthodox and humane.

24. Howells, William Dean, A Modern Instance (New York: The Library Press of America., nd [1882]), p. 194Google Scholar.

25. Howells, William Dean, The Rise of Silas Lapham (New York: The Library of America, 1982 [1885]Google Scholar); The Minister's Charge (New York: The Library of America, 1989 [1886]Google Scholar); The Quality of Mercy (Bloornington: Indiana University Press, 1979 [1892]Google Scholar).

26. Howells, , Rise of Silas Lapham, p. 1044Google Scholar

27. Howells, William Dean, The Minister's Charge (New York: The Library of America: 1989 [1886]), p. 4Google Scholar.

28. Dreiser, Theodore, Dreiser Looks at Russia (New York: Horace Liveright, 1928), p. 152Google Scholar. Croly, , Promise of American Life, pp. 160,170Google Scholar.

29. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The House of Seven Gables (Scholastic Book Services, 1965), pp. 322–26Google Scholar.

30. Howells, William Dean, The Vacation of the Kelwyns (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1920, emphasis suppliedGoogle Scholar): “In town we forget what a large part death plays in the social interests in the country. A funeral is a prized event, and the particulars are talked over to the least detail for weeks, as often as friends of the family meet or go to the village for the exchange of gossip…It's a remnant of the strength of the old Puritan days when people faced not only death but damnation—when they were willing to be damned for the glory of God….

They're (the rural puritan descendants) not up to the moral level of the Shakers, who have the immediate and instant help of one another in their goodness, but the average life here is good, and its not affected by the intimate knowledge of evil around it; the sort of knowledge people have in towns, and which would be depraving here if it were not guarded by the principles inherited from the past. If Puritanism was false in doctrine, as we both think, it was true in life, and its as true now as ever” (226–227).

31. Theodore Dreiser was a life-long believer and active supporter of Stalin and the Soviet Union. As Swanberg notes: “his attitude toward the Soviet embraced the utter acceptance of religious faith—a glowing, intuitive concept of the one nation on earth that elevated the multitude and obliterated the capitalist. So eccentric was his political thinking that his passion for Russia had not quelled his admiration for Germany and his hope that Hitler, too, had world saving potentialities” (Swanberg, W. A., Dreiser [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1965], p. 476Google Scholar). Howells's insistence on the rule of popular majorities, and a Jeffersonian confidence in the wisdom and justice of people, allowed him to see the totalitarian implications of the Progressives’ view of the state.

32. Howells, Willaim Dean, The Undiscovered Country (New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1880), pp. 56–57,129Google Scholar.

33. Contrast the end of Christian's pilgrimage: “But glorious it was to see how the open region was filled with horses and chariots, with trumpeters and pipers, with singers and players upon stringed instruments, to welcome the pilgrims as they went up, and followed another open gate in at the city” (Bunyan, John, The Pilgrim's Progress from this World to that Which is to Come [Philadelphia: J. W. Bradley, 1859], pp. 530–31Google Scholar).

34. The absence of such a community perhaps doomed the marriage of Marcia Gaylord and Bartley Hubbard in A Modern Instance.

35. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Blithedale Romance (New York: Penguin Books, 1986Google Scholar).

36. Howells, William Dean, A Foregone Conclusion (New York: The Library of America, 1982), pp. 141,169Google Scholar.

37. Ibid., pp. 154,156.

38. Lynn, Kenneth S., William Dean Howells: An American Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Janovich, Inc., 1971), pp. 231–32Google Scholar.

39. Howells, William Dean, The Altrurian Romances (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1968 [1907]), p. 389Google Scholar. Altruria is different from New York City, of which Howells was highly critical, pp. 275–84, 365, 366, 388.

40. Ibid., p. 171.

41. Ibid., pp. 398–99

42. Engeman, Thomas S., “Hythloday's Utopia and More's England: An Intrepretation of Thomas More's Utopia.” Journal of Politics (1982): 131–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43. Contrast Bellamy, Edward, Looking Backward (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1995 [1888]), pp. 162–74Google Scholar, his industrial utopia with the consistent religiosity and agrarianism found in Altruria described above.

44. Howells, William D., The Leatherwood God (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1976), pp. 3–4,159Google Scholar. The indirect target of Howells's criticism is Mormonism.

45. Ibid., p. 118

46. For a similar view see Updike, John, In the Beauty of the Lilies (New York: Ballintine Books, 1996), pp 361–491Google Scholar. In this novel the cult leader, Jesse, is the embodiment of the characteristic personality of modern America, the narcissist. “Being a star makes you very narcissistic…He looked at the high-ranch messiah, to see if he understood. In 1987 everybody knew about narcissism” (381,298,354,360).

47. Howells, , Leatherwood God, p. 157Google Scholar.

48. Ibid., pp. 105,106.

49. Locke, John, A Letter Concerning Toleration (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1990 [1689]), pp. 19, 22Google Scholar

50. Hough, Robert L., The Quiet Rebel (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1959), pp. 3,4, 76, 82–108, 111, 112Google Scholar

51. While Progressive intellectuals like Vernon Parrington and Henry Steele Commager praised Howells's progressive politics, Progressive literary figures did not. Next to H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis most effectively criticized Howells. In his famous Nobel Prize acceptance speech Lewis spared little: “It was with the emergence of William Dean Howells that we (Americans) first began to have something like a standard, and a very bad standard it was. Mr. Howells was one of the gentlest, sweetest and most honest of men and had the code of a pious old maid whose greatest delight is to have tea at the vicarage” (New York Times, 13 12 1930Google Scholar).

52. Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Gay Science #125Google Scholar. Heidegger, Martin, The Question Concerning Technology, ed. and trans. Lovitt, William (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977), pp. 49, 66–67Google Scholar.

53. Tocqueville, , Democracy in America, pp. 31,35–36,39,43,45Google Scholar. Lipset, American Exceptionalism, pp. 19–23, 61–67.