New England’s New Jerusalem: Puritan Hebraism and the Wilderness in American Religion

• In Event: 1580 - Section on Sociology of Religion Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 06. Theoretical Developments and Applications

Abstract

In contemporary debates, the public role of religion is often conceptualized around how religious ideas influence political debates. However compelling, these accounts miss how religious establishments are also important because they open up numerous pathways for religious leaders to shape the material structures (the roads, the buildings, etc.) that make social interaction possible. Scholars in the sociology of religion have started to underline how the organization of material objects facilitates belief, and in turn embraced materially oriented theories of social cause. This paper extends these arguments by examining how New England’s Puritan religious elites understood the role of material infrastructure in the development of their idealized religious communities. It reflects on the role played by frontier conditions and their interpretation within a framework that linked the Puritan present with the biblical past of the Exilic Hebrews. It urges that this attention to the built environment within the tradition shows how religious leaders adapted their model of the built environment to the challenges of missionary competition, how religious schemes to materially develop social life were consistently transposed between generations in the hopes of generalizing their effects, and how religious dissenters framed their own alternative religious movements in a similar mode. Through this narrative, it suggests that understanding the spatial dimensions of religious conflict can help us to understand how secularization entailed not merely an institutional transformation, but a practical one as well.

Author

• Samuel David Stabler, Yale