Christopher Trigg's volume is an expansive and detailed conversation with eighteenth and nineteenth-century interlocutors centered on their ideas about the afterlife. Trigg shows how early eighteenth-century theologies about the next world – notions rooted in the Puritan era – managed to cast long shadows even into the early nineteenth century, in which the “emphases on the heavenly reunion of family and friends and the eternal expansion of human capabilities have close analogues in earlier Puritan texts” (13). He maintains that robust and corporeal visions of life after death were central to the Puritan project, explicated in the first generation of Puritan divines and amplified in the works of Cotton Mather and Thomas Prince. Far from being harbingers of radical individualism and modernity, these Puritan thinkers held to beliefs that were traditional and communitarian. They clung to the notion that resurrected communities, rather than insular individuals, made up the celestial realm. And while by the early nineteenth century their eschatological dream was fading, American literary figures as diverse as Edgar Allen Poe and George Lippard heard the faint echoes of Puritan voices in their fascination with life beyond the grave.
Trigg's analysis begins with the first founders of Puritanism in North America. Focusing on leaders John Cotton and Thomas Shepard, he argues convincingly that they held to a vision that resurrection “linked Christians to the living, the dead, and those yet to be born” (21). Their communitarian ethos set them apart from the true modernizers in colonial New England – radicals such as Anne Hutchinson, Samuel Gorton, and the Quakers, who created the intellectual scaffolding for a more solitary, individual, and eventually secular, outlook on the afterlife. Trigg wants to stand with the Puritans in validating how their corporeal and communitarian vision of life after death endowed them with commitments to justice and righteousness on this earth. Divine judgement rendered responsibility necessary.
The emphasis on “collective life after death” reached its apogee in the works of Cotton Mather (59). Trigg's chapter on Mather's works and his engagement with the “First Resurrection” in particular is a tour de force. While no brief review can do justice to his analysis, Trigg demonstrates that Mather's eschatology was focused on “proving that the collective aspect of human existence did not expire with mortal life” (78). Indeed, Trigg's interpretation of Mather's resurrection theology reveals that “his description of resurrection as a return to earth, rather than a direct flight to heaven, contests the modern sense of what salvation means” (99). Here again, the Puritans stand as a bulwark against the rising tide of modernism and a fluffy, nether worldly understanding of the individual saints in heaven. Trigg's excavation of Mather's work is one of the book's strengths, though readers unfamiliar with the corpus of Cotton Mather's theology and life may find this to be a challenging read.
Perhaps the volume's most compelling chapter takes up what Trigg calls “Resurrection's Racial Politics.” He explores the racial politics of the afterlife, engaging with thinkers who wondered whether black people could enjoy heavenly salvation without being bleached white. Would the saints become luminous in heaven, or would they retain the tincture of race? Trigg's exploration of the work of Samuel Sewall, especially his tract The Selling of Joseph, restores race to the wider colonial conversation about the afterlife. More important, however, is the light that Trigg shines on the thoughts of black folks themselves. Witnesses such as Jupiter Hammon, “the first black author to be published in colonial America,” Ignatius Sancho, and Ottobah Cugoano in his Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery, enrich the volume immeasurably (134–138). Here, Trigg's analysis of the connection between politics and resurrection comes most clear: “By suggesting that resurrected bodies could be black, Hall, Cugoano, and Sancho made a powerful case for African political emancipation” (138).
Trigg's next chapter returns to the world of the Puritans and offers a close examination of the thought of the eighteenth-century New England theologian Thomas Prince. Prince advanced the thinking of earlier divines by his deep interest “in the problem of the globe itself – how would the fallen corrupted earth be made worthy of the resurrected and perfected saints of the millennium?” (145). In Trigg's telling, Thomas Prince emerges as a hybrid thinker, part theologian and part scientist. He was “committed to understanding (as far as was possible) the scientific processes by which the regeneration of the world would take place (the adjustment of the earth's orbit, the purification of its atmosphere)” (176–177).
The final chapter of the volume, titled “Secular Resurrections” takes a different approach, pointing to those Trigg terms “post Christian authors” (177). He explores Enlightenment avatars Jefferson, Franklin, and Thomas Paine to chart how visions of the afterlife became unmoored from their Puritan roots. He examines the works of early national writers and literary figures to trace how shadows of these earlier communitarian engagements with the afterlife could still be glimpsed – metaphorically and metonymically – in the decades before the Civil War. Ministers and theologians, for the most part, move to the sidelines here to make way for Spiritualists, novelists, and literary figures. While Trigg acknowledges that antebellum Americans developed an elaborate cult of the dead – one thinks of detailed mourning rituals, hair jewelry, postmortem photography, iconography and painting, as well as the emergence of the rural cemetery movement – he largely eschews analysis of it (182). This omission may have been a lost opportunity for the book. In the decades leading up to the Civil War and during the conflict itself, discussion of heaven brimmed among clergy and church members alike.
This is a provocative, dense, and sometimes confounding book. Readers unfamiliar with the nuances of Puritan theology and American intellectual history will need to have reference resources at the ready. The citation format is confusing – sometimes sources are noted with a traditional superscripted footnote number and other times parenthetical citations are introduced. There are copyediting errors and complex sentences that make the narrative challenging to digest. To be fair, many of these problems are not Trigg's and perhaps rightly belong to the production process at Oxford University Press.
Advanced scholars of American church history, however, will likely be able to overlook these obstacles and benefit from the depth of Trigg's research and his insightful analysis.
