History of Christianity

Over the past few decades, heritage tourism, pilgrimage routes, and public festivity have emerged as important resources shaping identities and channeling cultural flows in our global world. This field-based study of contemporary Luther and Reformation festivals and Protestant pilgrimage in Wittenberg, Germany, places the reader on the ground in Wittenberg’s festival and tourism scene. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, Wittenberg, city of Martin Luther, each year plays host to two large-scale, public Luther festivals and is also a destination of tourists and pilgrims in search of heritage, authenticity, and origins. Integrating historical context, an ethnographic approach, and ideas drawn from ritual studies and performance theory, this book offers rich, descriptive accounts and critical interpretations of the contemporary public performance of the Reformation. The book examines the multidimensionality of Wittenberg’s festivals, exploring the dynamics of diverse ritual and performative genres, including liturgy, processions, parades, street performance, civil religion, and carnival. The book also takes up the themes of Protestant pilgrimage and the sacralizing of space through architectural, visual, and performative means.

The Reformation of Feeling looks beyond and beneath the formal doctrinal and moral demands of the Reformation in Germany in order to examine the emotional tenor of the programs that the emerging creeds—revised Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism/Reformed theology—developed for their members. As revealed by the surviving sermons from this period, preaching clergy of each faith both explicitly and implicitly provided their listeners with distinct models of a mood to be cultivated. To encourage their parishioners to make an emotional investment in their faith, all three drew upon rhetorical elements that were already present in late medieval Catholicism and elevated them into confessional touchstones. Looking at archival materials containing direct references to feeling, this book focuses on treatments of death and sermons on the Passion. It amplifies these sources with considerations of the decorative, liturgical, musical, and disciplinary changes that ecclesiastical leaders introduced during the period from the late fifteenth to the end of the sventeenth century. Within individual sermons, it also examines topical elements—including Jews at the crucifixion, the Virgin Mary's voluminous weeping below the Cross, and struggles against competing denominations—which were intended to arouse particular kinds of sentiment. Finally, it discusses surviving testimony from the laity in order to assess at least some Christians' reception of these lessons on proper devotional feeling. This book presents a cultural rather than theological or behavioral study of the broader movement to remake Christianity. As it demonstrates, in the eyes of the Reformation's formative personalities, strict adherence to doctrine and upright demeanor did not constitute an adequate piety. The truly devout had to engage their hearts in their faith.

The Second Disestablishment: Church and State in Nineteenth-Century America is a history of the development of church-state law during what may be called the “forgotten century.” Traditional accounts of church and state commonly discuss the events surrounding the drafting of the First Amendment to the Constitution and then shift to the modern era of church-state relations, which began with the involvement of the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1940s and incorporation of the Bill of Rights. The events that connect the first disestablishment with twentieth-century incorporation have been little studied or understood. The Second Disestablishment fills this gap by describing the dynamic events of the nineteenth century that affected church-state relationships: the rise of evangelical Protestantism to cultural dominance through moral reform societies; the enforcement of sumptuary laws through a maxim that Christianity formed part of the law; the gradual secularization of the law through the adoption of alternative theories; the challenges of an increasing religious pluralism; and the transformation of a Protestant-oriented public education system. The book examines the competing ideologies represented by evangelical Protestants who sought to create a “Christian nation” and other citizens who advocated broader notions of the separation of church and state. The Second Disestablishment demonstrates that, during the nineteenth century, a gradual transformation occurred in legal and popular attitudes toward church-state matters, leading to broader understandings of disestablishment and laying the foundation for modern Supreme Court jurisprudence.

The millenarian movement founded by Joanna Southcott (1750-1814), enjoyed a complex relationship with political radicalism in early nineteenth-century England. Southcott opposed radicalism during her lifetime, encouraging her followers to await a messianic agent of the millennium, called Shiloh. By the 1830s – close to two decades after Southcott’s dramatic death expecting to give birth to the Shiloh – a section of surviving Southcottians were noted radicals, anticipating the millennium’s appearance through radical reform, trades unionism and Robert Owen’s socialism. This book presents a new explanation why – an explanation that reveals how millennial theologies may combine expectations of both divine and human agency in changing the world. Utilising a substantial range of radical and Southcottian sources, many previously unstudied, this book narrates a new history of this significant plebeian sect between 1815 and 1840. It argues that millenarian radicalism bore no connection to the social or gender makeup of Southcottianism; indeed, contrary to existing histories, the sect had no distinct appeal to women. Instead, an altered attitude towards political action emerged through the religious experience, ideas and practices of Southcottians and their personal acquaintanceship with radical freethinkers. The book provides the most extensive academic study to date of several leading Southcottians, including John Wroe (1782-1863), John ‘Zion’ Ward (1781-1837), and James Elishama Smith (1801-57) – a notable yet understudied early socialist, whose reflections on the relationship between socialism and religion shed new light on an emerging tension between Christian and secular visions of transformation which have shaped the modern world.