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“My God and My Good Mother”: The Irony of Horace Bushnell‘s Gendered Republic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Mark Edwards
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Extract

The impact of Horace Bushnell on American religion has been well documented, but the cultural significance of his life and thought has not been fully appreciated. A Congregationalist and pioneering ecumenist, Bushnell has been cast as the father of evangelical liberalism by theologians and religious historians. His numerous published sermons and treatises on child nurture, religious language, and the atonement were widely read during the nineteenth century and made him a celebrated and often controversial figure. Though vehemently opposed to Darwinian naturalism later in life, he nevertheless oversaw the collapse of Calvinist transcendence into the confines of historical and cultural development—which has been the definitive characteristic of liberal Protestant spirituality since the 1870s. Yet, during an age of social transformation, is Bushnell better understood as a laissez-faire liberal or an organicist social conservative? Better still, how might we characterize the relationship between his mediating theology and ambiguous social thought?

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , Winter 2003 , pp. 111 - 137
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2003

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References

Notes

The author would like to thank Susan Curtis and Scott Hoffman for insightful comments and criticism during the writing of this essay.

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2. Watts, Steven, The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790-1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), xviii–xxiii Google Scholar; Cayton, Mary Kupiec, Emerson's Emergence: Seifand Society in the Transformation of New England, 1800-1845 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), x-xi, 7–33 Google Scholar; Barnes, Howard A., Horace Bushnell and the Virtuous Republic (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1991), x-xi, 129-30, 165-78Google Scholar. Watts builds upon the work of Gordon Wood and Joyce Appleby in offering a “new interpretive synthesis” of early American culture (xvii). Watts understands nineteenth-century liberalizationprimarily in socio-economic rather than political terms—as the arrival of market capitalism and economic individualism—and it is in that more limited sense that I discuss Bushnell as an ambivalent liberalizer. Barnes himself admitted without explanation that “in the area of economics Bushnell revealed more individualism than was usual for him” (44).

3. As a general rule, Bushnell historians have failed to look beneath his “separate spheres” rhetoric to see how gender complicated the whole of his religious and social thought. See, however, Douglas, Ann, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977)Google Scholar, who argues that Bushnell was part of a “feminized” New England clergy that taught Victorians to veil themselves in layers of sentiment rather than intelligently engage emergent social problems. I agree with Douglas that Bushnell's Calvinism was thoroughly feminine, but its socio-economic importance arises only when read against the very masculine concerns that she denies him.

4. Cheney, Mary Bushnell, Life and Letters of Horace Bushnell (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1880), 3–23 Google Scholar; Cayton, Emerson's Emergence, 7-32; Rotundo, E. Anthony, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era; (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 3, 20, 31–55 Google Scholar; Bushnell, Horace, “Sketches of His Grandmother and Mother (1874),” in Cheney, Life and Letters, 27–29 Google Scholar; and Cross, Horace Bushnell, 1-4.

5. Bushnell, “God's Way with a Soul,” in Cheney, Life and Letters, 1-2; Bushnell, “Sketches of His Grandmother and Mother,” 29. On the identity crises of antebellum male youths, see Rotundo, American Manhood, 56-74. Cross suggests that Bushnell's troubled college years were a result of his exposure to urban culture. In either case, he turned to the mother figure for resolution. See Cross, Horace Bushnell, 4-12.

6. Cross, Horace Bushnell, 3-12; Bushnell, “Sketches of His Grandmother and Mother,” 33; and Bushnell, Horace, Forgiveness and Law: Grounded in Principles Interpreted by Human Analogies (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1874; repr, New York: Regina, 1975), 121-22Google Scholar. Mary Ryan has discussed the pressures that the “maternal knot” of early Victorian domesticity placed upon sons, but what is interesting in Bushnell's case is how those tensions translated into a brilliant ca-reer as pastor/theologian. See Ryan, Mary P., The Empire of the Mother: American Writing about Domesticity, 1830-1860 (New York: Hawthorn Press, 1982), 45–70 Google Scholar.

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11. Bushnell, Barbarism the First Danger, 12, 21, 32; Horace Bushnell, “California, Its Characteristics and Prospects,” New Englander 16 (February 1858): 168; Christ, Carol, “Victorian Masculinity and the Angel of the House,” in A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women, ed. Vicinus, Martha (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 146-62Google Scholar; Catherine Beecher, quoted in Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 15; Horace Bushnell to wife, December 11,1852, in Cheney, Life and Letters, 275. On the doctrine of the separate spheres, see Cott, Nancy F., The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman's Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 63–100 Google Scholar; and Lewis, Jan, “Motherhood and the Construction of the Male Citizen in the United States, 1750-1850,” in Con-structions of the Seif ed. Levine, George (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 143-63Google Scholar, who argues that the separate spheres was a liberal capitalist phenomenon.

12. Bushnell, Barbarism the First Danger, 30-31; Bushnell, Horace, God in Christ: Three Discourses (Hartford: Brown and Parsons, 1849; repr., New York: AMS, 1972), 123, 191, 268, 212-13, 228Google Scholar. See also Douglas, Feminization of American Culture, for her similar treatment of Bushnell's Christianity.

13. Horace Bushnell to wife, January 1844, in Cheney, Life and Letters, 111; Bushnell, God in Christ, 162.

14. Bushnell, Horace, “The Passive Virtues,” in Horace Bushnell, Sermons for the New Life (New York: Charles Scribner, 1858), 413-14, 402-3Google Scholar; Daniel Webster, quoted in Lewis, “Motherhood and the Construction of the Male Citizen,” 143.

15. Haddorff, Dependence and Freedom, v-vii, 132-68; Horace Bushnell, “Unconscious rnfluence (1846),” in Bushnell, Sermons for the New Life, 194; Horace Bushnell, “Personality Developed by Religion (1854),” in Bushnell, Horace, The Spirit in Man: Sermons and Selections (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907), 194-98Google Scholar; Cherry, Conrad, Nature and the Religious Imagination: From Edwards to Bushnell (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Halttunen, Karen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 198–210 Google Scholar. On the interplay of “character” and “personality” in American culture, see Susman, Warren I., Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 273-85Google Scholar; Fox, Richard Wightman, “The Culture of Liberal Protestant Progressivism, 1875-1925,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (Winter 1993): 639-60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. Cross, Horace Bushnell, 52-72; Bushnell, Horace, Christian Nurture (Cleveland: Pilgrim, 1861, 1994), 9–10, 40, 20Google Scholar. This final edition of Bushnell's work reproduced and expanded upon the 1847 and 1848 editions.

17. Bushnell, Christian Nurture, 56, 59, 17-34; Douglas, Feminization of American Culture, 77; and Cheney, Life and Letters, 452-69. Bushnell's “masculine domesticity” and the advice literature that came out of it stands in contrast to the historiographical wisdom of a Margaret Marsh, which says that men did not play a significant role in the domestic sphere until the Progressive era. In fact, Victorian writers of both sexes expressed similar ideas about family dynamics, and many nineteenth-century men testified to the great joy they found in parenting, according to Laura McCall. See Marsh, Margaret, “Suburban Men and Masculine Domesticity, 1870-1915,” in Meanings for Manhood: Construction of Masculinity in Victorian America, ed. Carnes, Mark C. and Griffen, Clyde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 112-27Google Scholar; McCall, Laura, “‘Not So Wild a Dream’: The Domestic Fantasies of Literary Men and Women, 1820-1860,” in A Shared Experience: Men, Women, and the History of Gender, ed. McCall, Laura and Yacovone, Donald (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 176-94Google Scholar.

18. Beecher, Lyman, “The Necessity of Revivals of Religion to the Perpetuity of Our Civil and Religious Institutions (1831),” in Nationalism and Religion in America, ed. Hudson, Winthrop (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 105 Google Scholar; Bushnell, , Christian Nurture, 13, 63, 19-20Google Scholar; Bushnell, “American Politics,” 200; Horace Bushnell, “Growth, Not Conquest, the True Method of Christian Progress (1844),” in Bushnell, Horace, Views of Christian Nurture (Hartford: Edwin Hunt, 1847), 169 Google Scholar; Bushnell, God in Christ, 352-53; Singleton, Gregory H., “Protestant Voluntary Associations and the Shaping of Victorian America,” in Victorian America, ed. Walker, Daniel Howe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), 47–58 Google Scholar; Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, 92-98; Coontz, Stephanie, The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families, 1600-1900 (New York: Verso, 1988), 210-29Google Scholar. According to Lewis, “because the values of honesty, hard work, and benevolence were taught in the context of the home, they were stripped of all public meaning; citizens schooled in these virtues were freed of all public obligations other than the private practice of the principles of bourgeois morality.” See Lewis, “Motherhood and the Construction of the Male Citizen,” 155.

19. Cheney, Life and Letters, 52, 412; Bushnell, Horace, “The Military Discipline,” in Horace Bushnell, Sermons on Living Subjects (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1872), 416-17, 400-402Google Scholar; Rotundo, American Manhood, 172-74; Bushnell, Horace, “Taste and Fashion,” New Englander 1 (April 1843): 153-57Google Scholar; Long, Kathryn Teresa, The Revival of 1857-58: Interpreting an American Religious Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 68–92 Google Scholar.

20. Horace Bushnell, “Happiness and Joy,” in Bushnell, Sermons for the New Life, 232; Horace Bushnell, “A Week Day Sermon to Business Men (1857),” in Bushnell, Spirit in Man, 126; Cheney, Life and Letters, 410-11; Horace Bushnell, “Our Best Weapons Gotten by Conquest (1848),” in Bushnell, Spirit in Man, 118.

21. Howe, , Political Culture of the American Whigs, 9, 299–300 Google Scholar; Long, Revival of 1857-58, 83; Horace Bushnell, “Prosperity Our Duty (1847),” in Bushnell, Spirit in Man, 137, 143-44, 139, 144-45. See also Cross, Horace Bushnell, 44-51, for her treatment of Bushnell's thoughts on prosperity.

22. Bushnell, Horace, “Christ the Form of the Soul (1848),” in Bushnell, Spirit in Man, 44, 46Google Scholar; Bushnell, Horace, “Christian Comprehensiveness,” New Englander 6 (January 1848): 88, 90Google Scholar.

23. Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in Cayton, Emerson's Emergence, 213; Bushnell, , “The Age of Homespun (1851),” in Bushnell, Work and Play, 382, 404Google Scholar.

24. Fredrickson, George M., The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 9–29, 34-35, 48-49, 161-75Google Scholar; Moorehead, James H., American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War, 1860-1869 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 129-72Google Scholar; Rotundo, American Manhood, 222-39; Dubbert, A Man's Place, 55-79; Clyde Griffen, “Reconstructing Masculinity from the Evangelical Revival to the Waning of Progressivism: A Speculative Synthesis,” in Meanings for Manhood, ed. Carnes and Griffen, 185-92. On the “martial ideal” in postwar America, see Lears, T. J. Jackson, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 98–139 Google Scholar.

25. Cross, Horace Bushneil, 80, 133-36; Bushnell, Horace, Parting Words (Hartford: L. E. Hunt, 1859), 12, 17Google Scholar; Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs, 301-2; Horace Bushnell, unaddressed letter, 1862, in Cheney, Life and Letters, 477.

26. Bushnell, Barbarism the First Danger, 27; Horace Bushnell, “Reverses Needed (1861),” in Bushnell, Spirit in Man, 181; Horace Bushnell, “Populär Government by Divine Right (1864),” in Bushnell, Horace, Building Eras in Religion (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1881), 317 Google Scholar; Horace Bushnell, “Our Obligations to the Dead (1865),” in ibid., 328.

27. Bushnell, “Reverses Needed,” 164-81; Bushnell, “Popular Government by Divine Right,” 288, 290; Bushnell, “The Doctrine of Loyalty (1864),” in Bushnell, Work and Play, 373; Bushnell, “Our Obligations to the Dead,” 333; 331; Horace Bushnell, “Training for the Pulpit Manward (1868),” in Bushnell, Building Eras in Religion, 222, 245.

28. Joel Hawes, quoted in Douglas, Feminization of American Culture, 113; Bushnell, Horace, The Vicarious Sacrifice: Grounded in Principles of Universal Obligation (New York: Charles Scribner, 1865; repr., New York: Regina, 1972), 32, 14, 398-402, 545, 529Google Scholar. Barnes's claim that Bushnell's growing theological conservativism was a result of the declining social status of the republican gentry is completely unfounded when one considers (at least from Bushnell's perspective) the regeneration of republican intellectualism during the Civil War. See Barnes, Horace Bushneil, xi, 103.

29. Bushnell, Vicarious Sacrifice, 154, 48, 134, 133-50, 168-69, 182; Bushnell, Horace, “The Gentleness of God (1864),” in Horace Bushnell: Sermons, ed. Cherry, Conrad (New York: Paulist, 1985), 155 Google Scholar; Bushnell, Forgiveness and Law, 12, 247.

30. Bushnell, “Our Obligations to the Dead,” 354-55; Bushnell, Horace, Women's Suffrage: The Reform Against Nature (New York: Charles Scribner, 1869), 31 Google Scholar,165, 37, 94, 64, 89, 136, 93-94, 6-31, 176-77, 104; Rotundo, American Manhood, 217-21; Attie, Jeanie, Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 17–18, 248-75Google Scholar.

31. Bushnell, Women's Suffrage, 50-51.

32. Bushnell, Horace, “How to Make a Ripe and Right Old Age,” Hours at Home 4 (December 1866): 107 Google Scholar; Bushnell, Horace, “Of Insanity,” in Horace Bushnell, Moral Ilses of Dark Things (New York: Charles Scribner, 1868), 272 Google Scholar; Bushnell, Vicarious Sacrifice, 183-84. See Merish, Lori, Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 270–303 Google Scholar, who discusses “imperial manhood.” On the connection between masculinity and insanity, see John Starrett Hughes, “The Madness of the Separate Spheres: Insanity and Masculinity in Victorian Alabama,” in Meaningsfor Manhood, ed. Carnes and Griffen, 53-66.

33. Bushnell, Women's Suffrage, 7-8,183, 62, 65, 71-72.

34. Ibid., 99, 182, 66; Rotundo, American Manhood, 194-221.

35. Fredrickson, Inner Civil War, 183-98; Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs, 30; Long, , Revival of 1857-58, 95, 126-36Google Scholar; Horace Bushnell, “Building Eras in Religion (1868),” in Bushnell, Building Eras in Religion, 20-21, 26; Bushnell, Horace, “Natural History of the Yaguey Family,” Hours at Home 2 (March 1866): 416-17Google Scholar; Horace Bushnell, “How to Be a Christian in Trade,” in Bushnell, Sermons on Living Subjects, 263-67.

36. Bushnell, “Building Eras in Religion,” 34,19.

37. Cheney, Life and Letters, 320-21; Sizer, Lyde Cullen, The Political Work of Northern Women Writers and the Civil War, 1850-1872 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Richard D. Brown, “Modernization: A Victorian Climax,” in Victorian America, ed. Howe, 29-44. On the fortunes of later “mugwump” republican intellectuals, see Lears, No Place of Grace, xvi, 27,225.