Abstract
The Epilogue summarizes the various twists and turns in Brownson’s religious career. Cortés then considers several alternative explanations for Brownson’s religious mobility: individualism, geographic mobility, lack of formal education, weak religious authority. All of these are recognized as relevant, though Cortés argues that of all the factors that account for Brownson’s religious mobility, the goad of sectarianism is the most salient. The chapter ends with a discussion of just how generalizable sectarianism is in accounting for religious mobility.
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Notes
- 1.
Although such an interpretive scheme technically involves judgments that include opinions based on such things as history, philology, and theology, Protestant practitioners commonly excluded these fields of inquiry in forming their understanding of current events.
- 2.
Quoted in Theodore Maynard, Orestes Brownson: Yankee, Radical, Catholic (New York: Macmillan Co., 1943), 5.
- 3.
See William R. Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 65–71.
- 4.
See John B. Boles, The Great Revival, 1787–1805 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1972), 125–142.
- 5.
David M. Ludlum, Social Ferment in Vermont, 1791–1850 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 36.
- 6.
Ruth Alden Doan, The Miller Heresy, Millennialism, and American Culture (Philadelphia University Press, 1987), 122.
- 7.
Patrick W. Carey, ed., The Early Works of Orestes A. Brownson, Vol. 1: The Universalist Years, 1826–1829 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2000), 16.
- 8.
Patrick W. Carey, Orestes A. Brownson: American Religious Weathervane (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004), passim; for the married phase, see p. 18.
- 9.
Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004; originally 1978), 33. Corroborating Johnson is Richard Carwardine, ‘Unity, Pluralism, and the Spiritual Market-Place: Interdenominational Competition in the Early American Republic,’ in R. N. Swanson, Unity and Diversity in the Church (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996), 309.
- 10.
Laurence Milton Yorgason, ‘Some Demographic Aspects of One Hundred Early Mormon Converts, 1830–1837,’ (M.A. Thesis, Brigham Young University, 1974), 28ff.
- 11.
Alice Felt Tyler, Freedom’s Ferment: Phases of American Social History to 1860 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1944), 63.
- 12.
Michael Barkun, Crucible of the Millennium: The Burned-Over District of New York in the 1840s (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 35.
- 13.
Robert W. Delp, ‘Andrew Jackson Davis: Prophet of American Spiritualism,’ Journal of American History 54 (1967): 44.
- 14.
Quoted in Richard T. Hughes and C. Leonard Allen, Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630–1875 (Abilene: Abilene Christian University Press, 2008), 136.
- 15.
William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 161.
- 16.
Ibid., 64–67.
- 17.
David Paul Nord, ‘Religious Reading and Readers in Antebellum America,’ Journal of the Early Republic 15 (1995): 245.
- 18.
Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life, 351.
- 19.
Orestes Brownson, ‘Letters to an Unbeliever,’ in Carey, Early Works, Vol. 2, 260.
- 20.
Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 31.
- 21.
Carey, Orestes Brownson, 121. The importance of religious authority is even more pronounced among Mormons. See Mario De Pillis, ‘The Quest for Religious Authority and the Rise of Mormonism,’ Dialogue 1 (1966): 68–88.
- 22.
See Robert Habich, ‘Emerson’s Reluctant Foe: Andrews Norton and the Transcendentalist Controversy,’ New England Quarterly 65 (1992): 208–237; Mary K. Cayton, ‘Toward a Democratic Politics of Meaning-Making: The Transcendentalist Controversy and the Rise of Pluralist Discourse in Jacksonian Boston,’ Prospects 25 (2000): 35–68; Anne C. Rose, Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 70–93.
- 23.
Peter Berger, The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (New York: Anchor Press, 1979), 20.
- 24.
Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), 134.
- 25.
Ibid., 151.
- 26.
The most inflated figure (800,000) for converts to Catholicism appears in Edward J. Mannix, The American Convert Movement: Being a Popular Psychological Study of Eminent Types of Converts to the Catholic Church in America During the Last Century and a Quarter (New York: Devin-Adair Co., 1923). Only slightly less reliable is Richard Clarke, ‘Our Converts,’ American Catholic Quarterly Review 18 (1893): 539–561, who believed there were 700,000 converts that made Rome their home from the time of the Declaration through the nineteenth century. As stated earlier, the most reliable estimates (57,000) are found in Christine M. Bochen, The Journey to Rome: Conversion Literature by Nineteenth-Century American Catholics (New York: Garland, 1988).
- 27.
Brownson knew the scattered effect of the market personally because his mother was a Universalist, his father was a Presbyterian, one sister, Thorina, was a Methodist, and one brother, Oran, was a Mormon.
- 28.
Quoted in C.C. Goen, Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Denominational Schisms and the Coming of the American Civil War (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1985), 44.
- 29.
Quoted in Milton Powell, ed., The Voluntary Church: American Religious Life, 1740–1865: Seen Through the Eyes of European Visitors (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1967), 152.
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Cortés, Á. (2017). Epilogue. In: Sectarianism and Orestes Brownson in the American Religious Marketplace. Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700-2000. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51877-0_10
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