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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.
List of contents
- Introduction: Resurrection in the New World
- Chapter 1: Resurrection, Selfhood, and the Church
- Chapter 2: Cotton Mather and the First Resurrection
- Chapter 3: Resurrection's Racial Politics
- Chapter 4: Thomas Prince and the Resurrection of the World
- Chapter 5: Secular Resurrections
- Coda: Resurrection hereafter
About the author
Christopher Trigg is Assistant Professor of English at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His work on colonial and modern American religious culture has appeared in American Literature, Early American Literature, and Political Theology.
Summary
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.
Additional text
Trigg's careful engagements with this literary archive are welcome additions to ongoing critical conversations in early American studies and religious history, as well as investigations in the environmental humanities. Altogether, Trigg does not simply show why engaging with Protestant theologies of the resurrection matters for conceptions of politics, community, and the environment-a resurgence of secularist thinking To Walk the Earth Again continually unsettles and complicates. Instead, he illuminates how Protestant distributions of life and death, decay and reanimation, individual conversion and communal resurgence in early America persist as a political-theological substrate to a world we inhabit now.
