Abstract
Howard has written a remarkable essay in the history of ideas. His subject is the misunderstanding of American religion by European minds from the end of the eighteenth century and the role this misunderstanding has played in European apprehensions of the United States, expressed particularly in anti-American tropes. His focus is on post-(French)Revolutionary European self-imaginings and the role the American Other has played in these, and he scarcely touches on American responses to these readings except, implicitly, in writing this shrewd account. Almost in passing he offers a genealogy of the principal categories of the sociology of religion, focused in the assumption of the inevitable secularization of modern societies.
The thesis may be put simply: while in post-Revolutionary Europe religion – whether conceived positively or negatively – is always thought of primarily in relation to the state, in America the separation of church and state is considered to be a precondition for the flourishing of religion. In the European frame, religion is always a function of political power, either forming or oppressing citizens according to the optic taken, while in the American mind, citizens form themselves under the minimum tutelage of the state, and are free to seek appropriate kinds of religious expression to help them do so. In the one, liberty is considered abstractly, as a function of the right kind of government, and religion is an instrument to aid or obstruct its development; in the other, liberty belongs to individual men and women who make their own lives, in which religion may play a part.
From the European perspective, perception of America is dominated by concerns coming from the French Revolution and its effects. Americans appear to model the possible future of post-Revolutionary Europe, whether we are talking about economics, politics, culture or religion, and may be considered positively as free, enterprising and enthusiastic or negatively as self-serving, superficial and chaotic. The essay falls into two somewhat unequal halves. Howard first traces right-wing and then left-wing reactions to the United States from Independence to the twentieth century, which in each case offer descriptions that employ American religion to stand for the wider polity. In the first case, he traces three strands: English responses, particularly Fanny Trollope, Dickens and Arnold, which focus on the perceived lack of authority and social class; German Romantic criticisms of a loss of spirit, formation and culture, transforming into later analysis in terms of individualism and capital; and Catholic reactions that concentrate on the supposedly Protestant features of indifferentism and individualism, leading to subsequent encyclicals on Americanism and modernism. In the second case, Howard describes a left-wing tradition, also consisting in three strands: first, French universalist social accounts (building on Catholic models) by Condorcet and Saint-Simon that lead to Comte’s sociologie; second, Hegel’s account of religion and the left-Hegelian uses of it, in Feuerbach and Marx, to anticipate the criticism and end of religion; and, third, the fate of Romantic thought after 1848 leading to the anti-clerical liberalism of the French Third Republic. American religion has only a small place in this second tradition, which nevertheless sets the frame within which such practices will be misapprehended.
One of the pleasures of reading this essay is the careful and often ironic generation of the categories of the sociology of religion in these chapters: for example, linking Weber and Heidegger, tracing Durkheim’s anti-clerical roots, and pointing out the Ultramontane cast of critical theory. Without ever confusing the materials from right- and left-wing perspectives, Howard points out how extremes sometimes meet. He sums up these genealogies in a section on the ‘ethos’ of secularization − the consecration of a holistic account of social development that takes European (and particularly French) history as the privileged example of a series of stages through which all other societies will pass. In brief, a series of linked left-wing critiques, building on some right-wing perceptions, together create the social categories of the myth of inevitable secularization − one of the myths European intellectuals live by.
Within this frame, American religion presents a series of anomalies, most notably coupling entrepreneurial capitalism with repeatedly renewed religious enthusiasm. In the second half of the essay, Howard looks at two case studies of Europeans, Philip Schaff and Jacques Maritain, who spent long periods in the United States and who attempted to create a different basis for understanding American religion. In writing as Europeans, they also criticized the assumptions with which they had begun their explorations, in this fashion providing Howard with both his categories and his critique. Schaff, a Swiss Protestant who lived and worked in the United States from 1844 to 1893, distinguished both the conditions of the North American Revolution from the French and its lasting consequences, perceiving that ‘religion was disestablished in America so that it could thrive, not exiled so that it could perish’ (p. 153). He offered a perspective on the American work ethic as motivated by a Christian spirit rather than self-aggrandizement, and identified the public morality of philanthropy as a function of freedom and conscience. He also suggested that the American experiment was a necessary stage in the development of a modern Christianity. Maritain, a Catholic theologian who lived in the United States between 1940 and 1960, offered a renewed Thomism which led to several comparable conclusions. These chapters, while fascinating, lack the density of the earlier synthesis, and do not offer many further clues for a renewed history or sociology of religion.
Howard puts a lot of weight on the concept of the ‘social imaginary’, drawing on Charles Taylor and Jeffrey Cox in order to explain how the debates of intellectuals have wider effects, and suggesting by implication that the ‘controlling master narrative’ of the inevitability of secularization is a myth in the process of becoming true (p. 132). He therefore concludes by contrasting two kinds of theory of secularization (after Hugh Heclo), each presumably entailing a different future: between a European ‘zero-sum’ theory and an American account where religion and political institutions live together in some form of co-existence. Whilst the overall framework may need further refinement, this brilliant essay is an original contribution, with implications far beyond its original focus for the history and theory of secularization.