To Walk the Earth Again: The Politics of Resurrection in Early America (RELIGION IN AMERICA SERIES)

"The Quick and the Dead explores the political dimension of Anglo-American Protestant writing about the future resurrection of the dead between the seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Reading histories, epic poetry, funeral sermons, and scientific tracts alongside works of eschatological exegesis, the book challenges the conventional scholarly assumption that Protestantism's rejection of purgatory prepared the way for the individualization and secularization of Western attitudes towards mortality. A deeper engagement with the complex history of resurrection theology reveals the importance of collective solidarity with the dead for Protestant social and political thought. Puritans, Anglicans, Quakers, and radicals looked to resurrection to understand their communities' prospects in the uncertain terrain of colonial America. They also expressed their conviction that political identities and religious duties did not expire with the mortal body but were carried over into the next life. This belief shaped their positions on a wide variety of issues, including the limits of ecclesiastical and civil power, the relationship of humanity to the natural world, and the emerging rhetoric of racial difference. In the early national and antebellum periods, secular and Christian reformers drew on the idea of resurrection to imagine how American republicanism might transform society and politics and ameliorate the human form itself. Early-modern Protestants really believed that they would live again in the flesh. By taking this belief seriously, this book opens up new perspectives on their mutually constitutive visions of earthly and resurrected existence"-- Cover Series To Walk the Earth Again Copyright Dedication Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Resurrection in the New World 1. Resurrection, Selfhood, and the Church Eschatological Innovation in the Seventeenth Century Robert Baillie’s Attack on Resurrection Theology in New England Conversion as the “Cominge of Christ”: Anne Hutchinson’s Realized Eschatology “Men Think It Easie to Believe a Resurrection”: John Cotton’s and Thomas Shepard’s Responses to Hutchinson No Sacred History: Samuel Gorton’s Realized Eschatology The Inner Light Is the Risen Christ: Quaker Resurrection Theology 2. Cotton Mather and the First Resurrection Collective Life after Death The Greatest Work of Christ in America: Resurrection in the Magnalia Christi Americana Mather and the Science of Resurrection The Imperial Politics of Mather’s Millennialism The Bones of Joseph: Mather, Benjamin Colman, and the First Resurrection 3. Resurrection’s Racial Politics Protestant Evangelism and the Development of Racial Difference “Can the Ethiopian Change His Skin?”: Samuel Sewall, Resurrection, and Race “The Obedient Nations”: Non-​Europeans in Cotton Mather’s Millennium John Beach and Immaterial Resurrection Race, Resurrection, and Revivalism “The Heaven of Comparative Freedom”: Radical Black Eschatologies 4. Thomas Prince and the Resurrection of the World Prince’s Globalism “Perpetual Spring throughout the Earth”: Prince and the Millennial Transformation of the Planet Revivalism and Immortalism The Resurrection of Other Worlds: Prince and William Torrey’s Brief Discourse 5. Secular Resurrections Reworking and Rejecting Protestant Eschatology Resurrection as Metaphor Natural and Social Resurrection Debating Literal Belief in Resurrection Spiritualism, Sentimentalism, and Materialism Coda: Resurrection Hereafter Notes Works Cited Index The Protestant conviction that believers would rise again, in bodily form, after death, shaped their attitudes towards personal and religious identity, community, empire, progress, race, and the environment. In To Walk the Earth Again Christopher Trigg explores the political dimension of Anglo-American Protestant writing about the future resurrection of the dead, examining texts written between the seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. By reading histories, epic poetry, funeral sermons, and scientific tracts alongside works of eschatological exegesis, Trigg challenges the conventional scholarly assumption that Protestantism's rejection of purgatory prepared the way for the individualization and secularization of Western attitudes towards mortality. Puritans, Anglicans, Quakers, and radicals looked to resurrection to understand their communities' prospects in the uncertain terrain of colonial America. Their belief that political identities and religious duties did not expire with their mortal bodies but were carried over into the next life shaped their positions on a wide variety of issues, including the limits of ecclesiastical and civil power, the relationship of humanity to the natural world, and the emerging rhetoric of racial difference. In the early national and antebellum periods, secular and Christian reformers drew on the idea of resurrection to imagine how American republicanism might transform society and politics and ameliorate the human form itself. By taking early modern Protestant beliefs seriously, Trigg unfolds new perspectives on their mutually constitutive visions of earthly and resurrected existence.