AN EMANCIPATION OF THE MIND

Equality, humanity, and power were at the heart of America’s second founding.

In Nature’s God, Stewart examined the ideological and theological underpinnings of America’s founding fathers. Now turning to what he calls the nation’s second revolution, the Civil War, he offers a deeply researched history of the philosophical bonds that linked three monumental figures of the time: Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Theodore Parker. The author argues persuasively that the “radical philosophical vision that originated in early modern Europe” fueled both the American Revolution and the widespread European revolutions of 1848 and then tracked back across the Atlantic. Stewart closely examines the role of religion in antebellum America, when a “theology of the propertied classes” emerged as a justification for slavery and for the violent treatment of the enslaved. Douglass called religious slaveholders “the worst.” Piously citing scripture as justification, Confederate states proposed a Christian Republic with “benevolent Christian masters and grateful Christian slaves.” In the North, not immune to racism, none of the major religious denominations “endorsed abolition before the war broke out.” Abolitionists were branded as infidels. The Civil War, then, was more than a conflict over slavery; it pitted self-proclaimed God-fearing white Americans against religious skeptics like Lincoln and nonbelievers like Parker. The war also laid bare the pervasiveness of insidious economic inequality, not only between whites and Blacks, but between white oligarchs, owners of huge cotton plantations, and the middle class and poor whites who made up the rest of the country’s population. Slavery, Stewart asserts, “is best understood as a device through which the propertied exploit the entire nation by mobilizing one part of society to enforce the oppression of another at the expense of both.” After the war, proslavery theology led to a conservative counterrevolution that still permeates Christian nationalism and the religious right.

A sweeping, penetrating historical narrative.