Remapping Protestant Belief

In his now classic essay, David Morgan called on scholars to study religion as “the matter of belief” (Morgan 2010). Studying religion as “the matter of belief,” Morgan explained, pays attention to how religious people make belief with their bodies, sense experiences, memories, emotions, and interactions with objects, images, and other bodies (7-12). Morgan’s essay reframed belief in material terms to address a problem he and other scholars saw with the academic study of religion. As Morgan noted, “The academic study of religion in the modern West has been shaped by the idea that a religion is what someone believes, which consists of a discrete, subjective experience of assent to propositions” (1). Similar to Talal Asad and Malcolm Ruel, Morgan traced the association of religion with immaterial beliefs in the mind to “the creedal tradition of Christianity, which was intensified by Protestantism” (1). Other scholars have made similar arguments. For example, Birgit Meyer has argued that Max Weber and William James were “deeply influential exponents of the proverbial ‘Protestant bias’ in social-cultural approaches of religion” (Meyer 2012, 11). Despite engaging in the material study of Protestantism, many scholars still regard Protestantism as a religion that has primarily privileged immaterial beliefs in the mind.

This paper interrogates this scholarly framing of Protestantism, suggesting it has cut off our view of Protestantism and hindered us from fully visualizing Protestant worlds. The paper historicizes how scholars have come to accept that Protestantism is a quintessentially disenchanted, modern phenomenon focused on thinking about immaterial beliefs in the mind. It demonstrates that while many scholars have come to accept that Protestantism is responsible for the definition of religion as an immaterial belief in something, this notion is not actually inherent to Protestantism itself. The notion that religion is a belief in something is itself a particularly modern definition of religion that took popular hold in the 1890s in the United States among freethinkers who practiced the “religion of secularism.” This paper explores this phenomenon by examining the visual culture of freethinkers as well as Protestant material culture. 

Freethinkers looked back to Thomas Paine, the author of Common Sense and The Age of Reason, as the founder of “the religion of humanity” or “the religion of secularism” (Schmidt 2021, 1). They argued modern people should embrace Paine’s common-sense religion, which they hoped would finally replace “superstitious” religions. Significantly, freethinkers applied Enlightenment epistemologies regarding belief and objects in different ways than their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Protestant predecessors had done. In doing so, freethinkers offered new interpretations about the work of belief and objects in the practice of religion. Unlike most other religious people of the time, freethinkers did not accept material forms of the supernatural as reasonable evidence of God’s work in the world. As Leigh Eric Schmidt has explained, freethinkers argued the “material advancement of civilization depended on the . . . thorough demystification of ‘sacred things’” (23-24). According to freethinkers, enlightened religion should be divorced from supernatural people, objects, and places. It should focus on humanity and be grounded in realizing material progress in this world, not the afterlife (1-22). In support of this enlightened religion, freethinkers set to work criticizing Protestantism because they viewed it as a thoroughly material religion.

This particular way of framing religion took deep hold in the academy and set the parameters for scholarly views. By the mid-twentieth century, most historians of the United States could not fathom the ways in which nineteenth-century Protestants practiced material religion. Most historians adopted the secularization thesis as part of their historical method, which suggested that the Enlightenment’s focus on reason, common sense, modernity, and science ushered in a world where “superstitious” religion was on the decline and supernatural matter did not really exist. This method was indebted to freethinkers’ religion of secularism, which applied an alternative interpretation of Enlightenment epistemologies to religion, and Protestantism in particular. According to freethinkers, enlightened religious people did not engage supernatural objects like Protestants did. Enlightened religious people, they said, engaged religious objects as secular, historical objects that signified disembodied ideas. Historians applied these late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theories of religion and religious objects to past Protestant practices. When they did this, they dismissed the ways American Protestants defined sacred objects and beings as enlightened, supernatural entities. Using these “secular” methods, historians also applied modern assumptions about religious objects to deep Protestant history, especially the Protestant Reformation.

Remapping belief in Protestantism requires new examinations of Protestant history that do not rely on the secular historical method. In particular, this paper remaps Protestant belief by reevaluating the relationships between Protestantism and the Enlightenment. Protestants grounded their material practices of religion in Enlightenment epistemologies, even as Enlightenment philosophers criticized their material religion. If ordinary Protestants paid any attention to these philosophers’ critiques of material religion, they most likely assumed it was a critique of “unenlightened” Catholic practices. Few American Protestants, however, recognized Enlightenment philosophers’ critiques as applying to their own material practices of religion. From the mid-eighteenth century onward, Protestants argued that they sensed the supernatural through material forms of religion. 

J.Z. Smith famously interrogated the relation between “map” and “territory” in the study of religion. This paper has suggested the scholarly framing of Protestantism as a religion of immaterial beliefs has resulted in distorted views and has given us maps of Protestant worlds that do not match the territory. In drawing attention to the materiality of Protestant belief, I argue that materiality is not simply “a compelling register in which to examine belief” (Morgan 2010, 8), it is the register through which scholars should study most forms of American Protestantism because it is the way Protestants themselves have mapped their own belief.