Synopses & Reviews
The question of how religious and political languages interacted in the pulpit of the American Revolution has engaged scholars in literature, religion, intellectual history, symbolic anthropology, and American studies for over a generation. Drawing on recent work in ritual studies and the history of the sermon in colonial America, Weber enters the debate over the contexts of the mobilizing agency of revolutionary discourse through analysis of manuscript sermons, diaries, and letters of both evangelical and rationalist orators. By recreating the mental worlds of five individual ministers, this book dramatizes the rhetorical struggle of the clergy to make narrative sense out of the social and political upheaval around them and describes how patriot ministers eased their congregations through the bewildering passage from dependence to independence. In the process, it highlights the continuities in preaching modes from Awakening to Revolution as it reveals how the changing forms of ministerial discourse anticipate the eventual displacement of the evangelical clergy to the margins of social and communicative power by the end of the century.
Review
"Weber has spent countless hours reading handwritten sermons delivered by 18th-century Puritan ministers. What he discovered is that the 'New Light' ministers— followers of Jonathan Edwards—were actively involved in fanning the flames of their parishioners' revolutionary fervor. That's where he diverges from two centuries of received opinion. But the book is most exciting when Weber demonstrates the actual rhetorical changes these sermons undergo as society's primary spokesmen tried to exhort their audience to act, at the same time as they tried to contain the rebellion and the uncertain future propagated by it. Weber's portrait is of a ministry befuddled and, eventually, deprived of social power—but, nonetheless, sincere in their desire to achieve a sacred nation. This
book is an important contribution to the study of revolutionary rhetoric." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)