Modern Summer of Love: On Secularism in Antebellum America, Part III of VI. Chip Callahan Responds
The Author of Lewis Henry Morgan’s Being
Richard J. Callahan, Jr.
for a Panel at the 2012 Annual
Meeting of the American Academy of Religion:
A
Fabulous Rumor: Critical Interpretations of
John
Lardas Modern’s Secularism in Antebellum America
(University
of Chicago Press, 2011)
John Modern’s Secularism in Antebellum America is a beautiful book. I mean that
in a variety of senses. It is conceptually beautiful, literarily beautiful, and
physically beautiful. All of these beautiful pieces illustrate the care that
Modern has put into this work. It is clearly the product of hard labor and
great thoughtfulness. From the start the reader senses that Modern has voyaged
out beyond the safe harbors of American Religious History and returned with a new
vision. He is able to see Antebellum religious history with new eyes that were
formed in his voyages through the lands of social theory, genealogy, anthropologies
of modernity and secularity, and literary criticism.
It’s an itinerary not unfamiliar to contemporary scholars of Religious Studies, though its application to the study of American religion is still novel in a field that is so dominated by historians. He tells us that there were big, important changes to religion in the
Antebellum period, which is a plot line with which we are familiar. But we have
come to expect those changes to be narrated in terms of revivals, enthusiasms,
Arminianism, and democratization. Instead, Modern presents us with a new story
of Antebellum American religion, which is in fact a story of Antebellum
American secularism. The two co-exist; more, they are co-constitutive. Modern
paints the big changes in Antebellum religion in terms of a new way of
understanding what religion is, a new type of religious subject and self that
is bound up with the emergence (or production?) of the secular.
For Modern, secularism is not simply an absence
of religion, or religion’s binary opposite. Nor is it an easily identifiable
thing. It is an atmosphere, Modern tells us, a haunting, a series of resonances
and associations. “Whatever we are talking about when we talk about
secularism,” he writes, “exceeds our capacity to name it” (10). His book, he
notes, is “a series of ghost stories” (46), a “particular history of ghosts as
they become tangible in the lives of antebellum Americans who, in one way or
another, found themselves subject to modernity’s affects” (xxxiv).
Modern’s new story is powerful. It is
important. It drags us out of the internal Protestant narrative that has held
such a fierce grip on the field of American religious history, pulling us out
into the world a little bit further, embracing much more of history, and it throws
us off balance just enough to force us to take note of the ground we are
standing on and the restrictive parochialism of our historical vision and our
interpretive frames.
However: John Modern’s story of Antebellum
secularism is still a Protestant story. He situates the emergence of secularism
within a Protestant history, and the characters in his narrative are
(necessarily, for his purposes) all Protestant. He widens the lens on
Protestantism by including liberal Protestants as well as evangelicals, and spiritualists
as well as seemingly "secular" humanists who, we find, are rooted
through individual history and cultural episteme to a Protestant base.
Throughout the book Modern seems to slide between writing about "the
secular" (a term that, as an ideological and an epistemological project,
claims a universality) and qualifying his subject as "Protestant
secularism" (or even "Evangelical secularism). This slippage, though
perhaps unintentional, and perhaps easily clarified, nonetheless raises some
questions for me. The ghostly specter of secularism, in being named and
identified, cannot help but take some sort of shape, even as Modern struggles
mightily through form and content to keep the specter spectral. His literary
and analytical skills are put to the test, and they put his readers to the
test, as he eschews straightforward connections and causality in favor of
associative relations and comparative resonances. Yet, as will happen with
ghosts, calling them forth compels their materialization, and thus they begin
to take on a shape. And it is the shape, vague and hazy as it may be, of
Modern’s secularism that haunted me in my reading like a feeling under the skin
or a scent in the breeze. Difficult to put my finger on, but nonetheless
present.
 |
Lewis Henry Morgan, c. 1868 (Morgan
Papers,
University of Rochester) |
I was given the charge of responding to the
chapter on Lewis Henry Morgan. In many ways I am grateful, because I think this
chapter more than others helps me to frame particular questions about the
limitations and boundaries, as well as the promise, of Modern’s perspective.
Lewis Henry Morgan was the “founder of
scientific anthropology,” according to the great systematizer of knowledge
called the Encyclopedia Britannica. His classic League of the Iroquois (1851),
Modern tells us, “was part of the long transition from the study of a divinely
sanctioned human society toward the investigation of human articulations of
self and divinity as well as the relations between humans determined, in part,
by those articulations” (185). In his studies of the Iroquois and beavers, of
kinship systems and the universal system of social evolution, Morgan was
seeking, to use his own terms, “the Author of his being,” hoping “to comprehend
the purpose of his existence, and his final destiny” (183). To John Modern,
Morgan’s interest in Native American life, no less than his participation in
railroad development and iron excavation, was both an expression (or production?)
of an emerging secularism and a
performance of a kind of secular spirituality itself; that is, in Modern’s mind
it was a particular formation and performance of “religion.”
 |
title page of League of the Iroquois (1851)
|
How does Modern make this argument? First, by
defining secularism as a way of imagining a totalizing and immanent system for
mapping the human/world. Second, by finding connections between Morgan—either
personally or discursively—and various forms of Protestantism (which he’s
already mapped in the book: evangelicalism, liberal Protestantism, spirituality
and spiritualism). Morgan’s close friend, J. H. McIlvaine, a Presbyterian
minister “who spent over two decades trying to bring Morgan into the Christian
fold” (198), plays a decisive role in Modern’s reading of Morgan’s Protestant
secularism. McIlvaine’s concept of “voluntary attention” (which also makes an
appearance in Modern’s genealogy of spirituality earlier in the book), like
Horace Bushnell’s “interest in the rules that governed the process of human
relationality,” was “conceptually analogous to ethnographic works that would
appear during the second half of the century” (221). The drive toward reading
the world as a system of signs pointing to a coherent whole was a “particular
kind of Protestant sensibility that would inform Morgan’s future inquiries”
(220), albeit without the “theological understandings of the problems and
prospects of social sympathy” or the nomination of “God” as the author or final
meaning of that coherent whole (a neglect that McIlvaine took Morgan to task for).
Morgan also attended many lectures by Rev.
Eliphalet Nott, President of Union College and former Presbyterian pastor,
while Morgan was a student at Union. Knot used Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism in his lectures,
and Modern finds Nott’s and Kames’s Common Sense reasoning and spiritualist
sentiment resonating with Morgan’s ethnographic project. It doesn’t hurt that
Morgan lived in Rochester, New York, in the late 1840s, right in the middle of
the so-called “Burned-Over District” and the setting for the ghostly
experiences of the Fox sisters and the birth of modern spiritualism. Through
such links we are led to this claim:
From
the perspective of secularism in antebellum America, the threshold of
anthropological comprehensibility was crossed by way of a lone assumption made
with numerous inflections. Conservative and liberal Protestant alike, alongside
phrenologists, spiritualists, and self-styled ethnologists, posited the
uniformity of a symbolic system that made all human differences part of the same
epistemic arena. Here was the will to read a code that confirmed, in the act of
reading, that everything was connected and connectible. (221)
 |
| Bark
House (interior and exterior views). Illustration by Richard H. Pease, from Report on the Fabrics, Inventions, Implements and Utensils of the Iroquois, made to the Regents of the University, January 22, 1851, by Lewis H. Morgan |
Into this mix, throw Morgan’s personal interest
in the Iroquois as a source of some sort of authentic spiritual force and
identity, which led him to form the fraternal Order of the Iroquois, in which
he could play Indian while studying Indians, and his eventual initiation as a
member of the Seneca nation. Yet, according to
Modern, Morgan was also, in
Melville’s terms, an “Indian hater.” The march of progress was inevitable,
Morgan held; as they were incorporated into American civilization, Indians
would cease to be Indians. Thus, Morgan’s involvement with the railroad and
mineral industries, which were key material factors in the dispossession and
displacement of Native peoples in nineteenth century America, as well as the
interesting connection between members of the Order of the Iroquois and leaders
of industry, did not appear contradictory. Indeed, Morgan’s secular system of
understanding the unity of humanity within an immanent frame seemingly required the obliteration of those very
people who served as the foundation of that system based on the temporal
framework that gave the system its coherence. Modern has little to say about
secularism’s relationship to time, so far as I can tell, but it seems to me
that this might be a key element in the Protestant flavor of Protestant
secularism. I will return to this point momentarily.
But first, here are some questions that I would like to ask of John. It is a sign of the power of his book that it has raised so many fundamental questions in my mind.
But first, here are some questions that I would like to ask of John. It is a sign of the power of his book that it has raised so many fundamental questions in my mind.
My first question (really a cluster of
questions) is this: are there non-Protestant forms of secularism? Of "the
secular"? Or is all secularism, at least in the US, at least in Antebellum
America, necessarily Protestant or derived from Protestantism? Or is it just
the Protestant-related form(s) of secularism that Modern concerns himself with
in this study? If there might be other "secularisms" that are not
Protestant, then is it not likely that Protestant secularism was shaped and
formed in and through interactions with these other secularisms? Another way to
get at this question might be to ask: what is the "outside" of
secularism? What defines its borders and limits? What interactions (discursive
or otherwise) with its “others” shape its form? If religion and the secular are
co-constitutive, then might it also be the case that "Protestant
secularism" and other "secularisms" are also co-constitutive? Or
that the formation/claim/production/emergence of a "Protestant
secularism" (or even "the secular") is/was dependent upon
(co-constitutive with) something else?
Modern’s history and analysis of secularism seems to me to be too clean, even
in its messiness. Much like Foucault’s treatment of Europe’s epistemes, there is a sense of being in
a bubble, a closed system, in which all development is internal and
self-produced (Foucault 1970). Yet we know that things are more complicated than
that. There have always been options other than Protestantism in American
history, regardless of Protestantism’s dominance. That is not to call for a
“pluralistic” or “multicultural” or “more diverse” history, but to recognize
that insides are constituted in relation to outsides, and Protestant power and
dominance is and has been formed in relation to something that it defines and
has defined as not itself (regardless of how plastic its own borders might be).
There is a palpable underlying anger in this book,
aimed at the "normal" way of doing American religious history. But
does Modern's "evangelical conviction" (Modern 2012) compel him to
reinscribe a Protestant-centered historical narrative that simply reiterates
some of the dominant themes and concerns of "regular" American
religious history? What does it take to think outside of Protestantism in
American religious history, even while understanding that Protestantism
dominates American religious and cultural formation, including ideas and
practices of the secular?
 |
| Ely S. Parker as General Ulysses S. Grant’s military secretary, from Arthur C. Parker, The Life of Ely S. Parker: Last Grand Sachem of the Iroquois and General Grant’s Military Secretary (Buffalo: Buffalo Historical Society, 1919), frontispiece |
Ely Parker, Morgan’s Seneca friend and
“informant,” seems to me to be an important figure in this, leading me to ask:
what if Modern had paid more attention to Parker in the story? Not in the story
of Morgan's self-discovery, his search for the Author of his being, but in the
story of how Morgan’s "secular" project, as Modern classifies it, was
so multi-faceted, enabling it to fracture expected Protestant narratives.
 |
| Ely Parker's Grave |
Morgan's view "won" some might say;
civilization and progress dominated. But that is true only if we buy into his
measure of temporality in the first place. From another perspective, of course,
the Iroquois did not disappear. They are still with us, and the only way to see
them as "losing" is as a political/ideological project of violence
and power—which is not the same story of evolutionary progress that Morgan told.
Indians remain, but they have been marginalized by force of property, law, and violence.
They have not been epistemologically or ontologically surpassed. In fact,
epistemologically, indigenous forms may be gaining ground, perhaps, in
postmodern and postcolonial ways of seeing.
It is exactly Ely Parker’s hybridity, or refusal to adhere to the temporal order that underlies Morgan’s
Protestant secular orientation, that makes Parker so interesting in relation to
Morgan’s world-imagining project. Parker, in fact, transgresses a host of
boundaries that define Morgan’s secular world order and the easy assumptions of
American religious historians: as the son of a Baptist minister, and also a
leader in the “new” Handsome Lake religion of the Iroquois (as was his father);
as an Indian, and also a lawyer; as an Indian, and also a Civil War general
(who wrote the final draft of the terms of Confederate Army’s surrender at
Appomattox); as both a source for Morgan’s Indian play acting, and the gateway
to Morgan’s “actual” initiation into the Seneca; and as a translator of
contemporary Iroquois life into Morgan’s world and language. Moreover, Morgan
met Parker not through some ethnographic encounter in the wilds of the field,
but, as Modern tells us, when “Ely Parker enlisted Morgan and the order to
lobby on behalf of the Seneca in their legal battle to remain on the Tonawanda
reservation” when “the Ogden Land Company was seeking to remove the Seneca to
Kansas” (214).
It is exactly Ely Parker’s hybridity, or refusal to adhere to the temporal order that underlies Morgan’s
 |
| Lewis Morgan's grave |
 |
| Ely S.
Parker in native dress (clothing collected by Morgan for the State Cabinet of Natural History (NY). Engraving in Morgan, League of the Iroquois (1851), frontispiece |
Parker’s relationship to the “new religion” of Handsome Lake also complicates Morgan’s picture of Iroquois religion as an artifact from an evolutionarily earlier period of human progress, in that it calls attention to the ways that the “new religion” was mindful of, and incorporated, recent historical events (like Handsome Lake’s vision of George Washington in heaven). It suggests, in the very source of Morgan’s secular vision, an alternative temporality and alternative combinations of religious and secular resources.
I call attention to Ely Parker’s story in
relation to Lewis Henry Morgan’s secularism simply to raise the possibility
that there might be something important to consider here in terms of the
various labors that went into Morgan’s construction of a (Protestantly
inflected) immanent frame, not the least of which included the work of linking
identity and temporality in a material context of hybrid sociocultural and
religiopolitical formations and innovations that were racially and imperially
charged. Protestant secularism’s borders, its potentials and limitations, must
surely have drawn some inspiration and power from its producers’ navigation of
such terrain. Modern is right to explore Anthropology’s birth as a window into
Antebellum secularism, and to trace the residue of Morgan’s refusal to look
“outside” the world for the “author of his being.” In linking this process to
the subjects of the other chapters of his book, the resonances are clear. There
was something in the air, something similar connecting these Antebellum
projects. Yet I am left wondering and wanting to hear more about the influence
of a wider context of global interactions, material exchanges, and cultural negotiations
on these “secular” transformations.
My final
question is this: Modern writes that Morgan
represented the world at every
turn in his career as a matter of presence and calculability, relying upon
those representations in order to assure himself of his own presence and
calculability. Morgan’s drama of spirituality—his struggle to articulate and
practice a bounded selfhood amidst a world that was admittedly and radically
relational—was more than either a displacement or replacement of religion. It
was also a placement and, to some degree, enforcement of specific definitional
boundaries—religion as a solitary epistemic endeavor; religion as an interior
assessment of external forces; religion as a means of ‘spiritual independence.’
(234)
But
where does this term religion come
from here? Modern himself slips it in, and it is unclear exactly what its
status is. Morgan would not have recognized what he was doing as enforcing
definitional boundaries of religion, surely. Morgan is doing something here, something
akin, perhaps, to what evangelical Protestants and even spiritualists were
doing during this period. But what is at stake in nominating this “something” religion? Morgan himself, Modern tells
us, had a “life-long refusal to use religion as a category of
self-understanding” (200). In some sense, just as Morgan removed the language
of religion and theology from his activity and thought, attempting to transform
his frame from transcendent to immanent (though Modern finds him nevertheless
affirming a “transcendent yet non-theological totality” [235]), Modern slipped
it back in. Does this mean that Morgan’s secularism is secretly “religious”?
The flip side of the secularist claim that the religious is secretly the
secular misrecognized? One would think not. Surely Modern is employing the
category of religion here as an interpretive foil, as a way to confound
secularism’s telos and give us a new way of seeing. We do this in religious
studies sometimes. We treat something “as if” it were religion to see what
shakes out. Modern is tricky here. And it is here that it is best to recall his
statement, early on in the book, that he is a storyteller.
Haunting, as in the spectral presence of the
secular that is felt under the skin, is "integral to what it means to be
Modern," Dr. Modern tells us. He asserts that we need to appreciate
haunting as a social phenomenon of great import because it is integral to
"what it means, perhaps, to speak of a 'Modern book.'" That is,
Modern’s book. There it is, right up front in the introduction. As the penultimate storyteller,
and thus the author of (this formation of) Lewis Henry Morgan’s being, Modern’s
search for secularism in Antebellum America is a quest after the Author of his own being. Secularism is as Modern
makes it, even as he feels surely that secularism makes him. His is one
formulation among many, one way of telling the story. What will we do with it?
Will we allow it to entertain us, to transform us, to give us new ways of
seeing? John Modern has journeyed out beyond the safe harbors of American
religious history and returned with new vision, new stories, new cargo. Will we
find this cargo to be useful, or will we reject it as toxic and foreign? Where
will its enchantments lead? The next step is up to us, his readers, and our own
storytelling. One thing that I know for certain: John Modern has written a book
that is not easily let go of, one that poses challenges that promise to haunt
the study of religion in America for some time to come.
References
Foucault,
Michel. 1970 [1966]. The Order of Things.
New York: Pantheon.
Modern,
John Lardas. 2011. Secularism in
Antebellum America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
___________.
2012. “My Evangelical Conviction.” Religion
43(3), 439-457.
Morgan,
Lewis Henry. 1851. League of the Iroquois.
Rochester: Sage & Brother.
___________.
1877. Ancient Society. London:
MacMillan & Company.
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