Roundtable by Jessica Valenzuela
Voices of the Past, Present, and Future: How Eighteenth-Century Black Writers Reshape Twenty-First-Century Academia —Talking Back to the Enlightenment: Practicing Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.7
Cite: Valenzuela, Jessica. 2021. “Voices of the Past, Present, and Future: How Eighteenth-Century Black Writers Reshape Twenty-First-Century Academia —Talking Back to the Enlightenment: Practicing Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 20-21.
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To study US history, one must reopen wounds from the past trauma that has seeped down from generation to generation, inflicting pain on individuals of the Black community. The same discrimination remains an ugly scar that is ever present in today’s social climate. This cycle of hatred has evolved over time, rooted in the transatlantic slave trade. Studying the writings of Black authors—such as Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, and Ottobah Cugoano—is necessary to reshape academic discourse. These writings serve as important foundations for progressive acts toward racial justice. In an attempt to incorporate more Black voices into class curricula, members of academia have an important role in deciding who will be included on course reading lists and research activities. If students and teachers want to shape an inclusive space, they must hold conversations and discuss not only the root causes of racial discrimination but also how it has affected the current social climate in the United States. It is important to consider Black voices of the eighteenth century because students should be made aware of why the past is connected to racial discrimination in the present and why these issues perpetuate themselves. Wheatley, Equiano, and Cugoano each contribute to this dialogue. These writers were able to defend themselves, often writing with tropes like the “noble Negro” and using scriptural passages as a means of disproving the slander spewed by white egotistical male theorists like Immanuel Kant and David Hume.¹

Wheatley uses religious rhetoric to make her writing palatable for an eighteenth-century audience in her poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” Wheatley’s last couplet is a word of caution: “Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, / May be refin’d and join th’angelic train,”² reminding believers who hold prejudice against Black individuals that they are seen as equals to white people in God’s eyes. This subtle jab works well with Wheatley’s argument because she uses Christian rhetoric familiar to her readers as a source of agency; she exposes racial discrimination and situates herself within more human terms. Since I believe that discourses on the civil justice of the Black community should remain a part of academic discussion as a means of addressing racial injustices, Wheatley’s written contribution serves as a vital source of support and a touchstone for educators and readers.

Following Wheatley, Equiano and Cugoano were not afraid to use the “noble Negro” trope or their audience’s expectations about religion and identity to their advantage. These writers utilized Christian scripture as a means of disproving proslavery advocates by repositioning God’s message for racial equality in their narratives. In Equiano’s Narrative, he states, “Might not an African ask you, ‘learned you this from your God . . . do unto all men as you would men should do unto you,’” a passage from Matthew 7:12 that he directs toward the perpetrators of the slave trade.^[3] Equiano uses the word of God and is given agency by calling out Christian slave traders on their inhumane acts toward enslaved individuals and by exposing the blatant hypocrisy taking place. Similarly, Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments is a personal account of his life in which he relies on the Christian doctrine to support his narrative. Cugoano states that it is “the incumbent duty of all men of enlightened understanding, and of every man that has any claim or affinity to the name of Christian, that the base treatment which the African Slaves undergo, ought to be abolished; and it is moreover evident, that the whole, or any part of that iniquitous traffic of slavery, can no where, or in any degree, be admitted, but among those who must eventually resign their own claim to any degree of sensibility and humanity.”^[4] Based on his reasoning, persons engaging in the slave enterprise cannot claim to be humane, nor, through Cugoano’s linking this argument to Christianity, can they claim to be Christians. Similar to Wheatley, Cugoano and Equiano use religious rhetoric to co-opt the language of slavery and instead use it for abolitionism and personal liberation.

Given the brave choices made by these writers, it is our job as academics to give back agency to the eighteenth-century voices that have been drowned out by white supremacy. Our job is to break that mold and address the voices that have been marginalized and disregarded for centuries. I believe that through honest conversations about American history, students are able to understand how the past has shaped the current social climate and racial injustices.

ENDNOTES

[1] Ayanna Jackson-Fowler, “Phyllis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, and Ottobah Cugoano: Legacy of the Noble Negro,” in Transatlantic Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Kamille Stone Stanton and Julie A. Chappell (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 51–64. This article gives an overview of the term, using Wylie Sypher’s apt phrasing: it is “the African who united the traits of the white man, so that he might not be repulsive . . . and the traits of the Negro, so that he might arouse pity.” For more from Sypher, see Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery Literature of the XVIIIth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942).

[2] Phillis Wheatley, Phillis Wheatley: Complete Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin Books, 2001).

[3] Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 190.

[4] Ottobah Cugoano, “Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery: And Commerce of the Human Species, Humbly Submitted to the Inhabitants of Great-Britain, by Ottobah Cugoano, A Native of Africa,” in Black Atlantic Writers of the Eighteenth Century: Living the New Exodus in England and the Americas, ed. Adam Potkay and Sandra Burr (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 129–58, 130.

Roundtable by Jasmine Nevarez
An Imagined Reality—Talking Back to the Enlightenment: Practicing Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.6
Cite: Nevarez, Jasmine. 2021. “An Imagined Reality—Talking Back to the Enlightenment: Practicing Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 18-19.
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Growing up in a predominately Caucasian school district made me exceedingly aware of my differences from my peers, teachers, and school materials. As a young student, I was encouraged to accept the history that was handed to me. The history that often left me, a Mexican American woman, out of the narrative. What is striking about movements like the 1619 Project is that they work within the realm of lost stories to reconceptualize and reclaim a history that has been pushed to the side. The 1619 Project brings awareness to the Eurocentricity of US history because it provides a space for Black activists, writers, and innovators to rewrite the history themselves. Black writers such as Eve L. Ewing create imagined realities that fill in the Black voices and narratives that have been lost throughout colonial history. Ewing’s poem, “1773,” presents a lost dialogue between past and present as it restores Black history.¹

Ewing’s poem calls on the voice of Phillis Wheatley. Wheatley was one of the first African American females to be published, but only after her work was approved and her character was defended by a group of white men. In the opening paratext to Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, John Wheatley, who purchased her from slave traders, certifies her ability to write the included poems. On the following page, sixteen white men in Massachusetts write that they “assure the World, that the Poems specified in the following Page, were (as we verily believe) written by Phillis, a young Negro Girl” as a way of combatting the disbelief that Wheatley could write poetry.² Because Wheatley was a Black woman, she would not have been published without this group of white men vouching for her intelligence and her humanity. Ewing’s response begins by locating the reader at a nameless grave that transforms into the resting site of Wheatley: “Pretend I wrote this at your grave / Pretend the grave is marked / Pretend we know where it is.”³ The speaker paints an imagined reality as they question Wheatley from beyond the grave and receive answers not from Wheatley directly but from the racist Enlightenment rhetoric that surrounded her during her time. Ewing’s poem progresses through a one-sided conversation between the speaker and speechless—a conversation that symbolizes the forced silence of the Black past (Wheatley) and the restorative narrative of the Black present (Ewing).

Ewing’s poem points out the gaps within American history that silence Black voices and inserts a discourse between them that answers American complicity against Black people. She writes:

Pretend I was there with you, Phillis, when you asked in a letter to no one:
How many iambs to be a real human girl?
Which turn of phrase evidences a righteous heart?
If I know of Ovid may I keep my children?⁴

These questions offer a perspective where Ewing unveils the truth behind these disparities: white lives have always been held with more importance than Black lives. For no matter whether Wheatley was intelligent, whether she assimilated to Eurocentric culture, or whether a group of white men “supported” her, she would never be valued like a white man is valued. Ewing brings these inequities to the surface and creates a dialogue of truth between the silent past and the exposing present.

Ewing’s piece works to restore a Black narrative by creating a dialogue between the speaker and Wheatley that encapsulates the miseries of Black history and retells it from a modern point of view. It is the narrative of the unheard that has been stolen from slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, civil rights, and now Black Lives Matter. In a way, Ewing’s poem talks back to history and reclaims the truth behind it. Ewing and the 1619 Project invite the world to a reimagined truth to witness the Black experience of the past through the Black experience of the present.

ENDNOTES

[1] Eve L. Ewing, “1773,” The New York Times, August 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/african-american-poets.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur.

[2] Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London: A. Bell, 1773).

[3] Ewing, “1773.”

[4] Ewing, “1773.”

Roundtable by Mindy Lin
Colonialism from Past to Present—Talking Back to the Enlightenment: Practicing Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.5
Cite: Lin, Mindy. 2021. “Colonialism from Past to Present—Talking Back to the Enlightenment: Practicing Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 16-17.
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Etched onto the ocean-battered surface of Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts, the year 1620 remains ingrained in the cultural and literary memories of over three centuries of American identity. As a collective imaginary, the cultural monolith of American national belonging partakes in a historical narrative that extends its roots far beyond the shores of the North American coast and into the fragmented, mobile histories of the eighteenth-century Atlantic. The notions of Anglo-centricity in the dominant discourse of the Enlightenment are challenged by the existence of an extensive anthology of literatures that echoes many of the transnational experiences of the colonial legacy through storied portrayals of pivotal transatlantic figures.

Olivia Fairfield in The Woman of Colour, an anonymous novel about a mixed-race Jamaican heroine who must marry her white English cousin to retain her fortune, and the genealogical memories of the 1619 Project powerfully embody the voices of the oft-overlooked threads of Enlightenment prosperity—the plantations, the slave trade, and the fragmentation of people and communities—that characterize the timeline of New World discovery. Dating the history of the United States is an endeavor that necessitates a retelling of the stories that counter longstanding cultural narratives of white imperial dominancy. In the postcolonial context, apprehending the Enlightenment’s ideological narrative is a social imperative that necessitates the creation of literary spaces for the many Black men and women who embody Paul Gilroy’s vision of a “rhizomorphic, fractal” Atlantic.¹

Literature communicates the enduring effects of centuries of transnational interaction, one replete with struggles against the hierarchies of social power enabled by racialized imperialism. Having witnessed the subjugation of her people under imperial conquest in The Woman of Colour, Olivia Fairfield implicates her cousin’s sister-in-law, Mrs. Merton, for her prejudiced view of Olivia’s Jamaican heritage. Olivia’s unfettered observations of slavery’s inhumanity emerges within her dialogue as she condemns the hypocrisy of colonization and impels Mrs. Merton to affirm the immorality of racist imperial practices: “The feelings of humanity, the principles of my religion, would lead me, as a Christian, I trust, to pray for the extermination of this disgraceful traffic, while kindred claims . . . would likewise impel me to be anxious for the emancipation of my more immediate brethren!”² Likewise, the haunting poetries of the 1619 Project revolutionize modern perceptions of a nation born out of the ashes of a tragic colonial legacy; in each story is evidence of intergenerational trauma and systemic repression that speaks against privileging the colonizer’s narrative in our examinations of American history. Clint Smith writes in his poem, “I slide my ring finger from Senegal to South Carolina & feel the ocean separate a million families,”³ echoing the moving histories of people, communities, and nations that underwrite myths of a unified national identity. These declarations of transnational experience continue to resound the heterogeneity of resistances against the colonizer’s narrative and the salience of centering historically marginalized voices into the timeline of America’s inaugurating moments.

The imprints of racialized colonial ideologies remain embedded in the institutional workings of an American society that has historically privileged uncontested narrative portrayals of its conflicted past. It is the collective efforts of the many visionaries, scholars, and teachers of postcolonial methodology that inform future generations of the significance of revisiting historical experiences that speak against erasure. Contextualized in history and revived through mechanisms of postgenerational study, the literatures of colonialism continue to shape our understanding of the American identity as one partaking in intertwined discourses.

ENDNOTES

[1] Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 4.

[2] Lyndon J. Dominique, ed., The Woman of Colour (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2007), 81.

[3] Clint Smith, “August 1619,” The New York Times, August 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/african-american-poets.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur.

Roundtable by Nourhan
Noury? Nourhan? —Talking Back to the Enlightenment: Practicing Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.4
Cite: Nourhan. 2021. “Noury? Nourhan? —Talking Back to the Enlightenment: Practicing Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 14-15.
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Names are political. Dealing with coloniality is acknowledging that it functions in both covert and overt methods—that this violence is often internalized. My name is Nourhan. It means “the light of heaven”; my family gave me this name because they found it fitting to my personality. When we immigrated to the United States in 2005, no one besides my family said my name out loud, and when I started my first day of public school in 2008, my third-grade teacher told me, “Your name is really interesting. How do you like Noury?” I stuck with it. I liked that people would finally call me by something, and here’s how I rationalized it: Noury is who I am as an American, and Nourhan is who I am as an Egyptian. I lived with this distinction for a long time and continue to live with it today—discomfort, coloniality, and everything in between. Reading The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano by Olaudah Equiano and Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi has taught me that reclaiming one’s native name is a form of resistance to the dominant culture’s hegemonic control. By tracing Equiano and Ethe’s relationship to their names, I outline a mode of resistance that I hope to adopt one day.

Olaudah Equiano titles his narrative The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself. The evolution of his name goes as follows: Olaudah Equiano, Michael, Jacob, Gustavas Vassa.¹ To begin his narrative, Equiano gives a detailed account of his native land, citing the geographical markers, government hierarchical positions, economic standing, sociocultural traditions, religious practices, and his own familial background.² Accounts of Equiano’s homeland work together with his determined use of his birth name to claim and reclaim his African identity. In doing so, he resists colonial influence over his life experiences and writes his identity back into the colonial narrative. Equiano writes, “When you make men slaves, you deprive them of half their virtue, you set them in your own conduct an example of fraud, rapine, and cruelty.”³ Through the lens of Equiano’s double name, recontextualizing the line “set them in your own conduct” outlines a dichotomy between English and African names: the former is a signifier of oppression and the latter of liberation. The name Gustavas Vassa, which was assigned and not chosen by Equiano, serves as an afterthought in this title, reaffirming that the effects of colonization linger as an afterthought but do not dominate. By titling his narrative The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself, Equiano claims that this life belongs to the African man, Olaudah Equiano, and only he gets to name and define himself.

In Homegoing, we see a similar moment with Ethe and H in their chapter, which details the failures of the Reconstruction Era for Black Americans. Ethe leaves H after he calls her another name in bed, and during a tentative reunion, Ethe angrily echoes Equiano’s right to maintain one’s name. She says, “The day you called me that woman’s name, I thought, Ain’t I been through enough? Ain’t just about everything I ever had been taken away from me? My freedom. My family. My body. And now I don’t even own my name?”⁴ The importance of names for Ethe ties her to her cultural identity, the only essence of home she has left. When deprived of her name, Ethe’s personhood and identity were undermined; she was displaced from herself. Claiming her name and ensuring that those around her addressed her by her native name is her microcosmic act of power and resistance. Thus, the importance of her name is elevated to represent not just cultural ties and a claim to identity but also a place for healing from trauma.

Equiano and Ethe both demonstrate how reclamation of names plays a role in the reclamation of your own narrative. Decolonizing is a consistent effort based on the acknowledgment of the overt and covert ways that coloniality functions. How we name ourselves is a testament to that—and maybe someday my Massreya name, Nourhan, will function as a tool of decolonization.

ENDNOTES

[1] Olaudah Equiano, “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African,” in Black Atlantic Writers of the Eighteenth Century Living the New Exodus in England and the Americas, ed. Adam Potkay and Sandra Burr (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 155–225: 159.

[2] Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 167–176.

[3] Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 221.

[4] Gyasi, Homegoing, 175.

Roundtable by Kate Ozment
Introduction—Talking Back to the Enlightenment: Practicing Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.3
Cite: Ozment, Kate. 2021. “Introduction—Talking Back to the Enlightenment: Practicing Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 11-13.
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Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing begins with the story of two eighteenth-century Akan sisters—Effia and Esi—as they stand symbolically above and below a grate in a castle in Cape Coast. The women are half-sisters who never meet and are physically joined only in that moment, unknown to one another, before being separated by an ocean. Above the grate, Effia has just married James Collins, the white British governor of the fort. Effia lives in relative comfort but is separated from her family, culture, and practices and must confront the contradictory dehumanization of and attraction to Black Akan women.¹ Navigating this precarious world is hazardous for Effia and the other wives, including Eccoah, who notes, “There are women down there [in the dungeons] who look like us, and our husbands must learn to tell the difference.”² Below the grate, Esi has been sold into slavery and sits in muck and filth. She and the other women are stacked on one another, raped and assaulted, and beaten until they are moved to ships for transport to the Caribbean. While Effia shudders at the fates of the women, termed “cargo,” below,³ Esi is unable to imagine anything other than the horror of her present, which she refers to as the “Now.”⁴ The destruction of Esi’s conscious ties to her history dominoes through the generations: her daughter Ness does not learn how to speak Twi or understand its ties to the Akan,⁵ and Ness’s grandson H does not receive a full name because his mother committed suicide when she was kidnapped and forced into slavery. Yet through the novel, Gyasi explores not only the destruction of the slave system but also the ability of diasporic Akan people to persist, thrive, and eventually come to a place of healing and return.

Among other things, Gyasi’s novel is evocative for readers of eighteenth-century English literature. In a weaving narrative, Gyasi fictionalizes the stories that we cannot tell because of the destruction of family ties and the subsequent lack of documentation or English interest in printing stories of Black resilience.⁶ Homegoing is resonant with another modern example of engagement with Enlightenment legacies, the 1619 Project. The name focuses on the date the first slave ship traded in North America, and the project combines journalism with creative pieces where authors like Eve L. Ewing, Reginald Dwayne Betts, and Jesmyn Ward reimagine key moments in Black history. The project’s lead author, Nikole Hannah-Jones, explores slavery’s impact on American culture and Black Americans’ contributions to democracy. This focus has unsurprisingly been controversial because centering Black excellence in American culture clashes with national mythmaking rooted in American white supremacy, but it has also won Hannah-Jones a Pulitzer prize.^[7] Both the nonfiction and creative pieces work well with Enlightenment literatures; as an illustrative example, Ewing’s reflection on the Black poet Phillis Wheatley powerfully centers the humanity of an ambiguous author.

Homegoing and the 1619 Project frame a literature course on the British Enlightenment at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and provide a framework for “talking back” to historical literatures. The course’s syllabus features Anglo-American representations of Black and Indigenous lives alongside writings by Black and Indigenous authors. The course also asks students to explore how Enlightenment ideologies were simultaneously responsible for the language of natural rights and equality and the justification for mass enslavement and genocide. For its theoretical grounding, the course pulls from Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic and its subsequent discourse and connects this field to resonant iterations in Indigenous studies with Jace Weaver’s Red Atlantic and Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies.⁸ We use language about “contact zones” common in colonial studies as we position the work in the course as British identity globally constructed.⁹

Students interleave reading representations of Black and Indigenous peoples in Oroonoko (1688), The Female American (1767), Obi; or, Three-Finger’d Jack (1800), and The Woman of Colour (1808) with writing by Black and Indigenous authors. Some of these latter texts include Samson Occom’s A Short Narrative of My Life (1768), Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’s Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars (1772), Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects (1773), Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787), and Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789). Students contextualize these works with traditional secondary literary scholarship and contemporary perspectives: Gyasi’s novel and the 1619 Project. With Gyasi, students find that the novel seems to make explicit what many wish these texts had the ability to do in the period: articulate resistance to dehumanization in a form and language they recognize. With the 1619 Project, students were better able to look back at Wheatley’s careful coding and Cugoano’s meticulous spiritual arguments and recognize these authors’ intentions through the double alienation of eighteenth-century aesthetics and white supremacy operating through print norms.¹⁰

The following roundtable features the work of four students who completed this course during the Spring 2020 semester.  In a final project, students are asked to think about Homegoing and the 1619 Project in conversation with their reading of eighteenth-century literature. The prompt is open ended and allows students to make any connections they want between eighteenth-century texts and our contemporary perspectives: personal, pedagogical, interpretive, and so forth. These featured essays explore how contemporary perspectives could “talk back” to the past, helping modern readers understand implicit or obscured stories. Gyasi’s text is fiction, and Ewing’s “1773” poem about Wheatley hinges on the word imagine,¹¹ but both works provide catharsis and interpretation as they center a perspective—Black voices—that can feel muted in historical documents.

Like many courses during the Spring 2020 semester, this class was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic with a move to virtual instruction in March, and as most of our students live in the Los Angeles area, we sheltered in place for most of 2020. Because of decreased contact hours and where we were in completing the course readings, the course pivoted to focus more on Black writings in its last weeks. Given the extreme challenges of researching during a global pandemic that had shut down the university’s library, the final project did not require extensive engagement with secondary sources outside of those read in the class. Instead, the prompt asked students to respond personally and thoughtfully to primary sources—historical and contemporary—to center their own voices and perspectives and to articulate their responses to these narratives. Shortly after the course went virtual, the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others prompted months of protests that resonated with our coursework and increased the exigency of this work.¹²

In response, these students revised their essays, thinking carefully about the relationship between Enlightenment literatures (broadly defined) and our present discussions about race and equality in the United States and reflecting on the purpose of learning this literature during a global pandemic. Their perspectives, lives, and goals vary widely. They are all women of color with varying ties to American and other cultural, religious, and ethnic identities, and these backgrounds inform their work in different ways. Mindy Lin is a graduate student in English literature, Jasmine Nevarez is a recent graduate of the English BA program with intentions to go into academic curriculum development in California, and Nourhan and Jessica Valenzuela are seniors finishing their degrees in the English BA program. While each differs in their career goals and in their approach to the topic, they all consider how engaging with Enlightenment literature better prepares us to confront the challenges of the present. They think about the legacy of British constructions of identity, humanity, and power and how these constructions have been sedimented in the American school system; what it means to be women of color reading literature that dehumanizes their identities; and what our responsibility is as academics to engage with these literatures through an anti-racist pedagogy.

ENDNOTES

[1] This contradiction has been explored by Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14.

[2] Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (New York: Vintage Books, 2016), 25.

[3] Gyasi, Homegoing, 17.

[4] Gyasi, Homegoing, 31.

[5] Gyasi, Homegoing, 84.

[6] See Simon Gikandi, “Rethinking the Archive of Enslavement,” Early American Literature 50, no. 1 (2015): 81–102, https://doi.org/doi:10.1353/eal.2015.0020.

[7] We feel no need to rehash what is largely a baseless controversy here and give it a greater platform, but addressing the controversy in class was a useful and important part of the lesson.

[8] Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014); and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, Second Edition (London, New York, and Dunedin: Zed Books and Otago University Press, 2012).

[9] Kate Ozment would like to acknowledge several individuals for their influence on the development of this class. Shelby Johnson, Megan Peiser, Kerry Sinanan, and Lise-Hélène Smith provided a sounding board for its creation and execution. She has been inspired by many of the generous people using the #bigger6 and #litpoc hashtags, and she is particularly thankful for teaching models from Eugenia Zuroski and the Eighteenth-Century Fiction syllabus repository. Despite this advice, there were faults with this class; they are only hers, however.

[10] For more, see Joseph Rezek, “The Racialization of Print,” American Literary History 32, no. 3 (2020): 417–45 and Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein, eds., Early African American Print Culture (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

[11] Eve L. Ewing, “1773,” The New York Times, August 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/african-american-poets.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur.

[12] With this article, the authors stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and its work for racial justice in the United States.

Article Commentary by Victoria Ramirez Gentry 
‘Th’angelic train’: Evangelicals, the Black Lives Matter Movement, and the Anti-racist Christianity of Phillis Wheatley and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano (Article Commentary)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.2
Cite: Gentry, Victoria Ramirez. 2021. “‘Th’angelic train’: Evangelicals, the Black Lives Matter Movement, and the Anti-racist Christianity of Phillis Wheatley and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano (Article Commentary),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 5-10.
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On September 17, 2020, President Donald Trump spoke at the National Archives Museum for the White House Conference on American History and quoted Martin Luther King Jr: “We embrace the vision of Martin Luther King, where children are not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”¹ After misusing King to establish his point, Trump launched into his critique of “the left” and what he termed Critical Race Theory²: “By viewing every issue through the lens of race, [the left] want to impose a new segregation . . . Critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison.”³ This evoking of King’s memory to denounce Critical Race Theory reimagines both American history and Black peoples’ experiences in two different ways. First, Trump defines recognition of racism in American history as racist itself, perversely branding the pursuit of inclusion and diversity as segregation. Secondly, Trump neutralizes King as a proponent of nonviolence and compliance, ignoring the fact that King was arrested and beaten while fighting for civil rights.⁴ Further, Trump positions Critical Race Theory as a threat to Christianity, asserting that it views “hard work, rational thinking, the nuclear family, and belief in God” as “aspects of ‘whiteness.’”⁵ In this statement, Trump frames the efforts of anti-racism as an attack against Christianity itself. Specifically, Trump uses King, a Black man, to uphold white supremacist ideologies while asserting that standing up for the rights of Black individuals is anti-Christian.

Trump’s critique of Critical Race Theory as anti-Christian affirms the security of his white, evangelical followers.⁶ Despite their support waning in 2020, 72 percent of white evangelicals continued to support Trump while the majority of Black and Latinx Christians did not.⁷ During the 2020 election, white evangelicals created churches called “Patriot Churches,” praying for Trump’s reelection and claiming, “Black Lives Matter isn’t being powered by the Holy Spirit.”⁸ Indeed, Christianity and race have been intertwined for centuries, with white Christianity consistently opposing racial liberation.⁹ I use the term white Christianity¹⁰ to describe the historical racism that Christians have upheld in imagining Christ as white, ignoring and perpetuating racial injustice, and conflating faith in God with patriotism while refusing to criticize the racism in the United States.¹¹ Anthea Butler discusses evangelicals in her forthcoming book White Evangelical Racism and emphasizes that evangelicals are not simply religious but “a political group who have power and authority and influence and who follow after Republicanism.”¹² Thus, white Christianity has become deeply intertwined with politics as evangelicals often believe Republicans to be the Christian political candidates.¹³ Further, as evangelicals imagine Christ as white, this “renders bodies of color simultaneously visible and profane through metonymy, substituting the spiritual purity of a white Christ with a racialized idealized in whiteness.”¹⁴ To combat white Christianity of the eighteenth century, Phillis Wheatley’s (1753–1784) and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano’s (1757–1791) texts act as counternarratives that mount resistance to the oppression of their enslavers in their own, new forms of anti-racist Christianity. In her poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America” (1773), Wheatley writes “Christians, Negros, black as Cain, / May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.”¹⁵ Through her alignment of “Christians” and “Negros,” Wheatley not only establishes her right to the “angelic train” of Christian redemption but destabilizes the Black/white binary that wrongly identifies Christianity as belonging to whiteness. Joel Pace asserts that Wheatley enacts “Imag-I-nation,” a term he defines as involving “the ways identity is modified and maintained across the Atlantic by preserving as well as modifying cultural practices and yoking opposites.”¹⁶ While Wheatley and Cugoano destabilize the Black/white binary by “yoking” their own cultural identities with that of Christianity, I assert they also use that very binary to reject white Christianity and instead form an anti-racist Christianity in which blackness can no longer be equated with sin.

Wheatley and Cugoano rightly attack white Christianity’s designation of Blackness as sinful as this designation is exactly the relationship the present-day evangelicals continue to assert. A Christian opinion piece by Richard Land directs evangelicals to “reject” Black Lives Matter (BLM) because the movement is “antibiblical” because of its support of LGBTQ+.¹⁷ Land also insists that racism is an inevitable evil that “plagues every nation because this disgusting form of sinful human pride is common to the fallen human condition.”¹⁸ By conflating racism with pride, Land minimizes racism as a sin. Simultaneously, Land vehemently condemns the LGBTQ+ community, thus positioning some sins as inevitable and others as condemnable. Another evangelical, Mike Mazzalango, called George Floyd “a petty criminal who was killed while in police custody.”¹⁹ Both evangelicals condemn what they interpret to be sins of sexuality and perceived criminal activity but do not denounce racism for its inevitability. Despite Trump’s many sins, including sexual immorality and criminality,²⁰ “televangelist Jim Bakker urged his followers to oppose impeachment because God ‘anointed your president.’”²¹ Evangelicals like Mazzalango forgive Trump’s sins but do not offer the same grace to Floyd because he might have been a “criminal.”²² Cugoano and Wheatley countered this strand of white Christianity by advocating for resistance and rejecting hypocrisy that offers redemption and liberty to white people but not Black people.

Wheatley draws from her Biblical teachings to show her enslavers that Christianity does not only belong to them and that Black people should not be equated with sin:

’TWAS mercy brought me from my pagan land, 
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
‘Their color is a diabolic die.’
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.²³

Wheatley crosses the Black/white binary that imagines Christianity as belonging to whiteness by tying “pagan land” to “God” and “Savior” and “Christians” to “Negros.” She performs what Pace calls “Imag-I-nation”²⁴ wherein she draws together her own cultural history with that of Christianity, blurring the lines between what is white and what is Black. Wheatley further crosses the binary by embodying her oppressors’ voices, “Their color is a diabolic die,” undermining their judgement by asserting her skin color will not prevent her redemption. Further, she destabilizes the concept of Black skin as sinful when she writes “black as Cain,” referring to the biblical Cain who murdered his brother. Throughout history, religious leaders believed Black people came from “Cain, Canaan, Ham, and other ignoble biblical characters whom God ‘marked’ owing to transgression and sin.”²⁵ Thus, when Wheatley describes the sin of murder as black, she distinguishes Cain’s sin from the color of her skin, emphasizing that Blackness does not equal sin. Thus, Wheatley not only crosses the border but effectively claims Christianity for her own by drawing it to her side of the Black/white binary, constructing an anti-racist Christianity. In 2020, Black Christian minister Brenda Salter McNeil continues to embrace this anti-racist Christianity: “If you still support policies that cage up children, or that cause people of color to die of covid-19, that’s not reconciliation . . . It’s a smokescreen for racism.”²⁶ Black historian and writer Jemar Tisby notes, “What Black Lives Matter did was highlight the racism and white supremacy that still has a stranglehold on much of white Christianity.”²⁷ Like Wheatley, Black Christians uphold anti-racist Christianity, calling out white supremacy for its sins.

Cugoano also established anti-racist Christianity through Biblical language against his white oppressors, calling specifically for physical resistance in his text Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (1791). In Thoughts and Sentiments, Cugoano tells Christians to abolish slavery because it is sinful according to the Bible: “all men should love their neighbours as themselves and that they should do unto others, as they would that men should do to them.”²⁸ He thus constructs his counternarrative by “yoking opposites,”²⁹ drawing white Christian logic into an anti-racist plea for freedom. Cugoano does not simply plead for the abolishment of slavery but encourages a resistance: “Wherefore it is as much the duty of a man who is robbed in that manner to get out of the hands of his enslaver, as it is for an honest community of men to get out of the hands of rogues and villains.”³⁰ Regardless of slavery being law, Cugoano asserts slavery is not lawful according to the Bible; it is a sin, and therefore Black people should resist this law. Today, Christians argue over the lawfulness of the BLM protests occurring because of police brutality. Writer and founder of the Black feminist community “For Harriet,” Kimberly Foster has shared her views on protests and riots: “We don’t have to be respectable in this fight. People are dying . . . . We are past trying to neatly package our rage.”³¹ Foster’s views on property damage reflect Cugoano’s call for resistance—if the law is unjust, the people must “get out of the hands of rogues and villains.”³² 

The transatlantic archive depicts this physical resistance of enslaved people against the upholders of the law. Stephanie Smallwood writes of the way the Middle Passage turned enslaved people into commodities, detailing the enslaved people’s experiences on ships and in underground prisons.³³ Despite this “human commodification,” enslaved people revolted against their captors: “Though the captives managed to kill the ship’s doctor, boatswain, and two other crewmen, a hundred slaves also were killed in the fighting that ensued and the surviving rebels were eventually subdued.”³⁴ Even with the passive voice in the line “the surviving rebels were eventually subdued,” the slave traders are the active force in this sentence, killing and beating the enslaved. This description of the enslaved people’s rebellion and their consequent punishment parallels contemporary experiences between police and Black people. Mariame Kaba describes how police continue to “keep black and other marginalized people in check through threats of arrest, incarceration, violence and death.”³⁵ Police use violence against BLM protestors even though these protests are overwhelmingly peaceful.³⁶ Trump’s declaration “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”³⁷ and the outcry of Christians condemning rioting suggest that certain evangelicals value property more than the lives of Black people and prefer to condemn some sins—rioting, looting—more than they condemn the sin of murder. Instead of trying to understand the BLM cry for help and condemning the police who kill Black people, Trump labels protestors “THUGS,”³⁸ a highly racialized word,³⁹ heightening white evangelical fear of Black bodies and condemning Black resistance as a sin.

The labeling of Black resistance as sinful only further marks evangelicals’ attempt to exclude people of color from Christianity and mark them as dangerous. Christina Sharpe reminds us that a young Black boy is not just a boy but is labeled “thug.”⁴⁰ Pointing to the example of Michael Brown’s murder at the hand of Darren Wilson, Sharpe details how Wilson likens Brown to “Hulk Hogan,” describing him as “grunting” like an animal.⁴¹ This rhetoric removes all accountability from the shoulders of the cop responsible for killing Brown and simultaneously paints Brown as a monster, refusing to recognize him as a child. Cugoano also argued for the humanity of Black people: “Every man of any sensibility, whether he be a Christian or an heathen . . . must think, that for any man . . . to deal with their fellow-creatures as with the beasts of the field; or to account them as such  . . . those men . . . are the greatest villains in the world.”⁴² Cugoano establishes that white people have likened Black people to “beasts” and that Christians who think of Black people as animals are “the greatest villains in the world.” Therefore, while Christians condemn the sins of BLM and ignore murders by police, Cugoano makes it clear that the worst sin, the worst villains in the world, are the racists.

While Donald Trump used Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to make his point that anti-racism and Critical Race Theory are indeed anti-Christian and anti-American, King argued in the mode of the anti-racist Christianity of Wheatley and Cugoano. King states, “as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, when will you be satisfied? We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.”⁴³ King marched against the law, the very law that Trump and many evangelicals uphold, to fight against the sin of racism. Thus, while anti-racist Christianity offers redemption for all, Wheatley’s “angelic train” makes a distinction: Those who “join th’ angelic train” are “refin’d.”⁴⁴ To be refined means one must ask for forgiveness, must be cleansed of their sins. However, if Christians refuse to condemn racism and murder, they align themselves with “the greatest villains in the world.”[1] Wheatley’s “angelic train” may be just out of reach for white Christianity.

ENDNOTES

[1] Donald Trump, “Remarks by President Trump at the White House Conference on American History,” The White House, 17 September 2020, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-white-house-conference-american-history/.

[2] Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 3rd ed. (New York: New York University Press, 2017). Delgado and Stefancic define Critical Race Theory as “a collection of activists and scholars engaged in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power” (3). Critical Race Theory requires that racism be recognized, and it is this recognition of racism throughout the history of the United States that Trump dislikes.

[3] Trump, “Remarks by President Trump,” para. 19–20. For an explanation of the aims of the 1619 Project, see Jake Silverstein, “Why We Published The 1619 Project,” The New York Times, 20 December 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/magazine/1619-intro.html. According to the New York Times, “the goal of The 1619 Project is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year. Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.”

[4] Laura Visser-Maessen, “Getting to That Promised Land: Reclaiming Martin Luther King, Jr. and 21st Century Black Activism in the United States and Western Europe,” European Journal of American Studies 14, no. 1 (2019): 1–25.

[5] Trump, “Remarks by President Trump,” para. 15.

[6]  Daniel Miller, “The Mystery of Evangelical Trump Support?” Constellations 26, no. 1 (2019): 43–58; Dante Scala, “Polls and Elections: The Skeptical Faithful: How Trump Gained Momentum Among Evangelicals,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 50, no. 4 (2020): 927–47; Gerardo Martí, “The Unexpected Orthodoxy of Donald J. Trump: White Evangelical Support for the 45th President of the United States,” Sociology of Religion 80, no. 1 (2019): 1–8.

[7] Michael Lipka and Gregory A. Smith, “White Evangelical Approval of Trump Slips, but Eight-in-Ten Say They Would Vote for Him,” Pew Research Center, 1 July 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/07/01/white-evangelical-approval-of-trump-slips-but-eight-in-ten-say-they-would-vote-for-him/.

[8] Sarah Pulliam Bailey, “Seeking Power in Jesus’ Name: Trump Sparks a Rise of Patriot Churches,” The Washington Post, October 26, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2020/10/26/trump-christian-nationalism-patriot-church/.

[9] Michael G. Lacy, “Exposing the Spectrum of Whiteness: Rhetorical Conceptions of White Absolutism,” Annals of the International Communication Association 32, no. 1, (2008): 277–311, 281.

[10] I chose not to capitalize the word “white” because, as the Columbia Journalism Review asserts, “For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists.” See Mike Laws, “Why We Capitalize ‘Black’ (and not ‘white’),” Columbia Journalism Review, 16 June 2020, https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php.

[11] In using the term white Christianity, I am aware there are progressive Christians of different races and ethnic backgrounds (including white individuals) who fight for racial justice and stand up for LGBTQ+ rights. These individuals do not fit within the term “white Christianity” as defined above but move into the realm of anti-racist Christianity.

[12] Act.tv, “White Evangelical Racism. Anthea Butler Joins,” November 19, 2020, YouTube video, 00:56, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZpsrYGLeA.

[13] Daniel Miller, “The Mystery of Evangelical Trump Support?” Constellations 26, no. 1 (2019): 43–58; Dante Scala, “Polls and Elections: The Skeptical Faithful: How Trump Gained Momentum Among Evangelicals,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 50, no. 4 (2020): 927–47, 929.

[14] Gloria Nziba Pindi and Antonio Tomas De La Garza, “The Colonial Jesus: Deconstructing White Christianity,” in Interrogating the Communicative Power of Whiteness, ed. Dawn Marie D. McIntosh, Dreama G. Moon, and Thomas K. Nakayama (New York: Routledge, 2019), 218–238, 218.

[15] Phillis Wheatley, “On Being Brought From Africa to America,” in Complete Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin Classics, 2001), 13.

[16] Joel Pace, “Journeys of the Imagination in Wheatley and Coleridge,” in Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660–1830, ed. Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 238–253, 239.

[17] Richard Land, “A Southern Baptist Leader’s Response to the Black Lives Matter Movement: Opinion,” Tennessean, last modified August 20, 2020, https://www.tennessean.com/story/opinion/2020/08/20/southern-baptist-leader-richard-land-response-black-lives-matter-movement/5616017002/, para. 8.

[18] Land, “A Southern Baptist,” para. 8.

[19] Bobby Ross Jr., “Why the ‘Black Lives Matter’ Movement is so Controversial to Many Christians,” last modified July 8, 2020, https://christianchronicle.org/why-the-black-lives-matter-movement-is-so-controversial-to-many-christians/.

[20]. Jacques Berlinerblau, “Donald J. Trump, the White Evangelicals, and Martin Luther: A Hypothesis,” Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 73, no. 1, (2018): 18–30, 19.

[21] Sarah Posner, “No the Latest Scandal Won’t Make White Evangelicals Ditch Trump. Whatever It Is,” Washington Post, October 1, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/10/01/white-evangelicals-stay-trump/.

[22] Ross, “Why the ‘Black Lives Matter’ Movement.”

[23] Wheatley, “On Being Brought,” 13.

[24] Pace, “Journeys of the Imagination,” 239.

[25] Lacy, “Exposing the Spectrum,” 281.

[26] Eliza Griswold, “How Black Lives Matter is Changing the Church,” The New Yorker, August 30, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/news/on-religion/how-black-lives-matter-is-changing-the-church, para. 9.

[27] Griswold, “How Black Lives Matter,” para. 6.

[28] Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evils of Slavery, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin Classics, 1999), 11.

[29] Pace, “Journeys of the Imagination,” 239.

[30] Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments, 59.

[31]  Kimberly Foster, “Looting Should be the Least of Your Concerns,” For Harriet, June 2, 2020, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GPdkXV2t2Y.

[32] Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments, 59.

[33] Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Harvard University Press, 2007).

[34] Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 34, 43.

[35] Mariame Kaba, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,” New York Times, June 12, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html, para. 8.

[36] Sanya Mansoor, “93% of Black Lives Matter Protests Have Been Peaceful, New Report Finds,” Time, September 5, 2020, https://time.com/5886348/report-peaceful-protests/?fbclid=IwAR1s5AyO8tsb1R3F9oPrUX7rmIwulfIhEkrkL3ZH0QzL4D5BlaCoour2YqU.

[37] Donald Trump, “These THUGS are dishonoring,” Twitter, May 28, 2020, https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1266231100780744704. Due to Twitter suspending Donald Trump’s account, the tweet was removed. Responses and comments to the tweet can still be seen at this link.

[38] Trump, “These THUGS,” Twitter.

[39] Fakunle Smiley, “From ‘brute’ to ‘thug:’ The Demonization and Criminalization of Unarmed Black Male Victims in America,” Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment 26, no. 3–4, (2016): 350–66. Trump’s use of the term “thug” is highly racialized. Smiley asserts that the word “has become a way to describe Black males who reject or do not rise to the standard of White America” and has developed from the stereotype of Black men as “brutes.”

[40] Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 12.

[41]. Sharpe, In the Wake, 82.

[42] Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments, 25.

[43] Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream,” August 28, 1963, available at NPR, https://www.npr.org/2010/01/18/122701268/i-have-a-dream-speech-in-its-entirety.

[44] Wheatley, “On Being Brought,” 13.

[45] Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments, 25.

Article Commentary by Erica Johnson Edwards
Christianity’s Role in Colonial and Revolutionary Haiti (Article Commentary)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.1
Cite: Edwards, Erica Johnson. 2021. “Christianity’s Role in Colonial and Revolutionary Haiti (Article Commentary),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 1-4.
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On October 26, 2020, the US Senate confirmed Amy Coney-Barrett’s nomination to the US Supreme Court. In the lead up to her confirmation, while senators and the media focused heavily on her Catholic faith, some on social media drew attention to the two Haitian children she and her husband adopted following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.² The connections between Coney-Barret’s Christianity and the Haitian earthquake recalled Pat Robertson’s controversial claim that the earthquake was caused by a Haitian “pact with the devil” during the Haitian Revolution.³ Whatever else one might say about Robertson’s comments, they show his ignorance of the important but little-known role Christianity and the Catholic clergy played in eighteenth-century colonial Haiti.

Scholarly work on the Catholic Church and its clergy in the colony is minimal and does not offer much information on the Haitian Revolution.⁴ George Breathett claims the Catholic Church in colonial Haiti “practically disappeared during the excitement of the years following the revolt of 1791.”⁵ Sue Peabody suggests Christianity made the enslaved docile, and low eighteenth-century conversion rates allowed the enslaved to remain wild and violent, helping to bring about the Haitian Revolution.⁶ Other scholars, however, have begun to uncover the contributions of the religious to the Haitian Revolution. For instance, Laënnec Hurbon claims various primary sources demonstrate “the participation of the clergy in the insurrection of August 1791.”⁷ Hurbon references a similar study by Father Antoine Adrien that “makes it possible at once to abandon the current view that the clergy was wholly committed to the cause of slavery.”⁸ Indeed, my own research shows how the enslaved embraced Christianity throughout the eighteenth century and allied with Catholic clergy members during the Haitian Revolution.⁹

Scholars have long recognized the African religious origins of the Haitian Revolution but have focused too narrowly on Vodou.¹⁰ However, the enslaved brought other religious influences from Africa. Black Haitian Christianity traces back to the western coasts of Africa, where the Portuguese introduced Catholicism even before Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas. In the Kongo in particular, the local population embraced Christianity following the voluntary conversion of the Kingdom’s royalty and nobility. Over time, the Kongolese incorporated Christianity into their culture and adapted it for their own needs. Dating from the sixteenth century, Catholic clergy permitted syncretic practices in Kongolese Christianity.¹¹ A civil war in the Kingdom of Kongo lasting from the 1760s through the 1780s resulted in great numbers of prisoners of war who were sold into slavery in colonial Haiti. Many of the Kongolese soldiers would have been Christians or had at least been exposed to Christianity. By the time of the Haitian Revolution, the Kongolese had been practicing Christianity continuously for more than two centuries. European missionaries also had success in the Kingdom of Warri in West Africa. Under the Portuguese, a group of Augustinian monks introduced Christianity into the Kingdom of Warri in the second half of the sixteenth century. As in the Kongo, the king of Warri led his people, the Itsekiri, to accept Christianity. Local ministering, beyond the efforts of the royal family, would have been necessary to perpetuate Christianity in the Kingdom of Warri. Missionary activity waned and came up against resistant Itsekiri leaders throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Nonetheless, more than one hundred years later, a new ruler of the Itsekiri in the 1760s repeatedly requested that missionaries be sent to his kingdom, demonstrating a significant Christian spirit in Warri.¹² A significant proportion of those enslaved in colonial Haiti before the Haitian Revolution were from the Bight of Benin, a bay along the Atlantic coast stretching across modern Ghana and Nigeria that included the historic Kingdom of Warri.¹³

Before the Haitian Revolution, the Catholic clergy were not the only people taking part in the religious instruction of the enslaved population. Black catechists were vital in communicating Christianity with enslaved African populations because they better understood the languages and cosmologies of the potential African converts.¹⁴ Similar to the catechists in Africa, enslaved and free Blacks in colonial Haiti shared Christianity with one another. Haiti’s shortage of priests and growing enslaved population made it necessary for people of African descent to provide religious instruction.¹⁵ The religious hierarchy implemented by the Capuchins starting in the 1760s included the elevation of several baptized and married enslaved persons to lead catechism and prayer and serve as beadles while wearing a cassock and surplice.¹⁶ By rewarding certain enslaved peoples with church functions and official clerical attire, the Capuchins gave other enslaved peoples incentive to embrace Catholic rituals of baptism and marriage as well as instilled a positive perception of Catholicism and the clergy. In giving a small number of the enslaved an elevated status and observable benefits, the Capuchins positioned themselves as respectable paternal authorities for the enslaved. There was an active and faithful enslaved Christian population aiding the official clerics in spreading and maintaining Catholicism in the colony before the Haitian Revolution.

When the Haitian Revolution began in August 1791, parish priest Father Cachetan allied with the insurrectionists, serving as their chaplain. One plantation attorney explained, “Father Cachetan . . . preferred to stay in the midst of the black insurgents to preach the Evangel of the law to them, and encourage them to persist in an insurrection that was holy and legitimate in his eyes.”¹⁷ The attorney implied that the priest, like most whites, had the option to flee or be taken prisoner, but he willingly stayed with the insurgents because he fully supported their cause. In fact, when authorities took over the rebel camp where Cachetan resided, the priest claimed that “he was peaceful in the midst of his parishioners [the Blacks].”¹⁸ In calling them his parishioners, Cachetan demonstrated how he saw the shared humanity of enslaved Blacks and free whites. In keeping the priest among them, the revolutionaries signaled their value of Christianity and some clergy members in their fight against slavery. Authorities eventually imprisoned Cachetan but kept his punishment secret “in order not to scandalize the public and above all the blacks.”¹⁹ The perceived need for confidentiality regarding the consequences of Cachetan’s actions further indicates the depth of the alliance between the priest and the insurgents as well as a sense of denial on the part of many whites that the enslaved would rise up on their own. Nonetheless, if some believed that news of his death could incite further rebellion among the enslaved, he must have been a genuine ally, perhaps even an abolitionist.

Nearing the end of the Haitian Revolution, Black revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture assembled a group of colonists to draft a colonial constitution in 1801, which declared Catholicism the official religion of the island. Louverture corresponded with Abbé Henri Grégoire, member of the philanthropic society the Amis des Noirs in Paris, seeking more priests to volunteer to go to colonial Haiti. According to Paris’s Annales de la Religion, “For three years and on several occasions, he [Louverture] solicited Grégoire, his friend and that of the blacks . . . for the sending of twelve priests . . . . Grégoire proposed . . . to found a great church in [colonial Haiti].”²⁰ Eventually, Grégoire arranged for the establishment of four constitutional bishops in colonial Haiti.²¹ After Haitian independence from France in 1804, while the country continued to experience political struggles, the religious leaders continued as counsel to the newly founded Black nation. Just after declaring independence, Haiti’s leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines ordered the massacre of most of the whites in Haiti. However, Dessalines spared “a handful of whites,” including many clergy members, “distinguished by the opinions they have always held and who, besides, have taken the oath to live with us obedient to the law.”²² Through the revolution and independence, one priest continuously counseled the Haitian authorities. Corneille Brelle, or Corneille de Douai, served as a chaplain to Louverture and performed Dessalines’s coronation as emperor in 1805.²³ When Dessalines signed the first Haitian constitution as emperor in 1805, independent Haiti did not have an official religion but allowed for freedom of worship.²⁴

Christianity and the Catholic clergy maintained a constant presence in eighteenth-century Haiti, and that legacy lives on in Haiti’s current Christian population. In fact, despite what Pat Robertson would have us believe, it is likely the children Coney-Barrett adopted came from Haitian Christian homes. According to The World Factbook put out by the CIA, Haiti’s population is more than eighty-two percent Christian, with over half of the Black nation being Catholic. Through the effort of nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries, around twenty-eight percent of Haitians identify as Baptist, Pentecostal, Adventist, or Methodist.²⁵ Yet, only two percent of Haiti’s population reports practicing Vodou, even though it was recognized as an official religion in 2003.²⁶ Of course, Vodou is a syncretic religion, combining African animism with Catholicism, so some Haitians may practice a form of Catholicism quite different than people in France or other parts of the world. Nonetheless, Christianity has been part of Haitian life since its beginnings as a French colony and continues in the twenty-first century.

ENDNOTES

[1] Following the lead of Rob Taber, I use colonial Haiti instead of Saint-Domingue. See Robert D. Taber, “Saint-Domingue or Colonial Haiti? Naming Conventions and Perspective in Historical Analysis” (paper presentation, Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, Atlanta, GA, February 2019); Taber, “Family Formation, Race, and Honor in Colonial Haiti’s Communities, 1670–1789,” in French Connections: Cultural Mobility in North America and the Atlantic World, eds. Robert Englebert and Andrew Wegmann (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020), 146–169.

[2] John Cormack, “The New York Times Digs into the Adoptions of Amy Coney Barrett’s Children,” National Review, October 21, 2020, https://news.yahoo.com/york-times-digs-adoptions-amy-154928157.html.

[3] Frank James, “Pat Robertson Blames Haitian Devil Pact for Earthquake,” NPR, January 13, 2010, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2010/01/pat_robertson_blames_haitian_d.html.

[4] See for example, J. M. Jan, Les Congrégations religieuses à Colonial Haiti, 1681–1793 (Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1951); R. P. Joseph Janin, La Religion aux Colonies Française sous l’ancien régime (de 1626 à la Révolution) (Paris: D’Auteuil, 1942).

[5] George Amitheat Breathett, “Religious Missions in Colonial French Saint Domingue” (PhD diss., State University of Iowa, 1954), 154.

[6] Sue Peabody, “‘A Dangerous Zeal’: Catholic Missions in the French Antilles, 1625–1800,” French Historical Studies 25, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 53-90, 57.

[7] Laënnec Hurbon, “Church and Slavery in Colonial Haiti,” The Abolitions of Slavery: From Léger Félicité Sonthonax to Victor Schoelcher, 1793, 1794, 1848, ed. Marcel Dorigny (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 62.

[8] Hurbon, “Church and Slavery in Colonial Haiti,” 62.

[9] See Erica R. Johnson, Philanthropy and Race in the Haitian Revolution (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 23–67.

[10] See for example Léon-François Hoffman, “Un Mythe national: La cérémonie du Bois-Caïman,” in La République haïtienne: Etat des lieux et perspectives, eds. Gérard Barthélemy and Christian Girault (Paris: Karthala, 1993), 434–48; Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998); and Hein Vanhee, “Central African Popular Christianity and the Making of Haitian Vodou Religion,” in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, ed. Linda M. Heywood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 243–264.

[11] John K. Thornton, “The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491–1750,” The Journal of African History 25, no. 2 (1994): 147–167; Thornton, “On the Trail of Voodoo: African Christianity in Africa and the Americas,” The Americas 44, no. 3 (1988): 261–278; and Cécile Fromont, The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of the Kongo (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

[12] Alan Ryde, “Missionary Activity in the Kingdom of Warri to the Early Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 2, no. 1 (1960): 1–2, 5, 7, 21.

[13] Peabody, “‘A Dangerous Zeal,’” 65.

[14] Thornton, “On the Trail of Voodoo,” 270–71.

[15] Breathett, “Catholic Missionary Activity,” 281.

[16] Peabody, “‘A Dangerous Zeal,’” 85.

[17] Anonymous, “La Révolution de Saint-Domingue, contenant tout ce qui s’est passé dans la colonie française depuis le commencement de la Révolution jusqu’au départ de l’auteur pour la France, le 8 septembre 1792,” 300, F 3 141, 268, Archives nationales d’outre-mer.

[18] Anonymous, “La Révolution de Saint-Domingue, 268-269, Archives nationales d’outre-mer.

[19] Anonymous, “La Révolution de Saint-Domingue, 269, Archives nationales d’outre-mer..

[20] Annales de la religion, vol. 12 (Paris: Imprimerie-Libraire Chrétienne, 1801), 25–27.

[21] Jean-François Brière, “Abbé Grégoire and Haitian Independence,” Research in African Literatures 35, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 37.

[22] “Dessalines’ Proclamation, 28 April 1804,” translated and printed in The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History, 182.

[23] Hubert Cole, Christophe: King of Haiti (New York: Viking Press, 1967), 145, 191; Jacques de Cauna, Haïti: L’Eternelle Révolution (Monein: PRNG, 2009), 146.

[24] “Haitian Constitution,” translated and printed in Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804: A Brief History with Documents, eds. Laurent Dubois and John Garrigus (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 194.

[25] Bertin M. Louis, Jr. “Haiti’s Pact with the Devil?: Bwa Kayiman, Haitian Protestant Views of Vodou, and the Future of Haiti,” Religions 10, no. 8 (2019): 1–15.

[26] “Haiti: People and Society,” The World Factbook, accessed October 27, 2020, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/resources/the-world-factbook/geos/ha.html.

Editorial Introduction by SAMARA CAHILL (Blinn College) with TONYA J. MOUTRAY (Russell Sage College) and BRIJRAJ SINGH (Hostos Community College-CUNY, Professor Emeritus)
Cite: Cahill, Samara with Tonya J. Moutray and Brijraj Singh. 2019. “A Banner Year: Studying Religion and the Enlightenment in 2019.” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 1 (2): i- ix.
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Studies in Religion and Enlightenment (SRE) returns after a brief hiatus during the very busy spring and summer of 2019! This year was a milestone for eighteenth-century studies with the 50^th Anniversary of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) preceding the quadrennial congress of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS) in Edinburgh, Scotland. We at SRE believed 2019 would be an opportune year to take a snapshot of the robustness and diversity of religious content on the eighteenth-century studies conference circuit. This report chronologically surveys the major eighteenth-century conferences in 2019 and concludes with in-depth accounts of individual conferences by Tonya Moutray (reporting on H-WRBI) and Brijraj Singh (reporting on ISECS).

The eighteenth-century conference circuit began 2019 with the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS) conference “Islands and Isolation” (St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, January 4-6, 2019). Emma Salgård-Cunha chaired a panel on “Islands–or Communities–of Cultural Authority: Theology and Religion, the Law, and the Scottish Enlightenment.” Next year’s BSECS conference,“Natural, Unnatural and Supernatural,” will feature Donna Landry and Hannah Williams as plenary speakers. Williams will deliver a plenary address on “The Religion Problem” (January 8-10, 2020).

The South Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (SCSECS; Dallas, February 21-23, 2019), one of the earliest of the US regional conferences, had a particularly strong representation of religious content. Brett McInelly (Brigham Young University) chaired two panels on “Religious Perspectives and Perspectives on Religion.” Angelina Dulong, one of McInelly’s panelists, presented the paper “But Where Does it Come From? Moral Virtue in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela.” Dulong’s paper subsequently won the SCSECS Presidential Prize. The essay will be featured in an upcoming volume of 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (edited by Kevin Cope and published by Bucknell University Press). As McInelly points out, the “Religious Perspectives and Perspectives on Religion” panels “demonstrate the compelling ways religion and literature intersected throughout the long eighteenth century, whether in poetry, fiction, drama, or even review criticism.” Shortly before 2019 commenced, McInelly and co-editor Paul E. Kelly also published a collection of essays originally slated for publication in the journal Religion in the Age of Enlightenment, one of the casualties of the abrupt closing of AMS Press. McInelly and Kerry’s volume New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment (Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2018) is reviewed by Brijraj Singh (Hostos Community College) in this current issue.

ASECS, the largest eighteenth-century conference based in North America, was held in Denver (March 21-23, 2019). ASECS featured major panels or roundtables that considered the society’s evolution over the last 50 years, including the role of women in ASECS history and the work still to be done in rendering the conference more inclusive for minorities and nontraditional scholars. ASECS included an encouraging array of religious content, particularly Dustin Stewart’s (Columbia University) “ASECularization, 1969-2019” panel. The “ASECularization” panel was followed by a lively Q&A session that, prompted by questions from audience member Michael Griffin (University of Limerick), considered the emotional significance of Catholic or “baroque” language in the eighteenth century. Panels on other aspects of religion included “Women Writer’s and the Postsecular Eighteenth Century,” chaired by Juliette Paul (Christian Brothers University),” “Religious Satire,” chaired by Aleksondra Hultquist, (Stockton University), and “New Horizons of Evangelicalism in the Eighteenth Century,” chaired by Douglas Winiarski (University of Richmond).

2019 was certainly a banner year for eighteenth-century studies: not only did ASECS celebrate its 50^th anniversary, but the summer was filled with major conferences either specifically focused on religion or with significant religious content. These conferences included “Ort und Orte der Religion in der Aufklärung / The Place of Religion in the Enlightenment” (Halle, Germany, June 5-7, 2019); the “History of Women Religious of Britain and Ireland” conference (H-WRBI, June 6-8, 2019); and the international congress of ISECS (July 14-19, 2019).

Sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Center for European Enlightenment Studies (IZEA) and co-organized by Laura Stevens (University of Tulsa), Daniel Fulda, and Sabine Volk-Birke (both of Martin Luther University), the bilingual “Place of Religion in the Enlightenment” conference brought together an interdisciplinary band of leading scholars of religion in the Enlightenment. Evan Haefeli (Texas A&M University) described the conference as one in which “philosophers, historians, art historians, and literary scholars from Europe and America examined the many ways that religion figured in Enlightenment culture. Many of the presentations dealt with Protestant Britain and Germany, but several treated Catholic Europe. Topics included the religious quality of cosmopolitan culture; encounters with, or representations of, religious others (Catholic, Muslim, Hindu); collecting, displaying, and categorizing religion and religious difference; transformations and reforms in both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism prompted by an emphasis on reason. Primarily focused on elites (highly educated individuals, aristocrats, and religious leaders), significant attention was also given to women’s participation in these phenomena.” Dr. Haefeli’s observations coincided with a number of comments by scholars at other conferences this year that spoke to a growing recognition of the need to consider not only the “global” eighteenth century, but also to consider global religions in the eighteenth century. The importance of incorporating global and indigenous perspectives was a thematic thread weaving throughout eighteenth-century conferences this year. The ASECS program, for instance, featured on its program cover page “Eagle of Delight” (c.1822), a portrait of Hayne Hudjihini of the Otoe Tribe by Charles Bird King. Further, the ISECS program featured a detail of the well-known double portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and her Cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray (c. 1780) attributed to David Martin.

Questions of inclusivity were raised at the “50 Years of Women at ASECS” roundtable and by Laura Stevens at “The Place of Religion” conference. Indeed, Stevens pointed out that, despite the organizers’ efforts to the contrary, and despite the bilingual format, the conference remained largely Eurocentric rather than global in its scope. Nevertheless, the “Place of Religion” conference brought together leaders in the study of religion in the “long” eighteenth century, developed important conversations about global perspectives and the politics of language access and translation (including the dominance of English at eighteenth-century conferences), and featured three plenary addresses and a public keynote address. Phyllis Mack (Rutgers University) presented the opening plenary “‘Wilt Thou Go on my Errand?’ The Travels and Travails of Quaker Women Preachers”; Wolfgang Braungart (Universität Bielefeld) followed with the Plenary “Religiosität in der Literatur um 1800,” and Kim Sloan (British Museum, London) delivered the Public Keynote, “The Display of Religious Objects. The Enlightenment Gallery in the British Museum and Sir Hans Sloane’s Miscellanies.” Kristina Bross (Purdue University) presented the final Plenary on “Millenialism, Translatio, and the English Global Imagination.”  The conference also included several exciting outings, from a casual reception at a “Krug” on the banks of the River Saale to an upscale dinner at the MahnS Chateau. The conference organizers further provided attendees with the opportunity to take a guided tour of the Francke Foundations, a “Guided Stroll to Selected Religious Sites of Halle” with Dr. Andrea Thiele, and an excursion to “Lutherstadt,” Wittenberg with Dr. Hans-Jürgen Grabbe.

In addition to the “Place of Religion” conference, several other conferences with eighteenth-century religious content were hosted in Germany and nearby countries. Bärbel Czennia (McNeese State University) kindly translated these German conference titles and provided brief descriptions. Held shortly after ASECS, “Berlin, Preußen und die Katholiken im 18. Jahrhundert” / Berlin, Prussia, and the Catholics during the 18th Century (March 25, 2019, Katholische Akademie in Berlin) was a lecture series on the history of Saint Hedwig. More recently, “Korrespondenznetzwerke protestantischer Fürstinnen im 16. -18. Jahrhundert” / Correspondence networks of Protestant female rulers/princesses, 16th-18th century (September 18-20, 2019) was held at the University of Greifswald. Elsewhere in Europe, the “Aufklärung und Religion” / Enlightenment and Religion conference (March 22-23, 2019) was held at the Universität Luzern, Switzerland and the 4th Isnard-Wilhelm-Frank Conference “Building Bridges and Paving the Way: Dominicans at the Frontiers of Catholic Christianity” (October 17-19, 2019) was held in Vienna, Austria. The annual conference of the Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies conference “Diaspora and Law: Culture, Religion, and Jurisprudence beyond Sovereignty” was held November 17-19, 2019 (Berlin-Brandenburg).

Upcoming events include “Book religion or binarity? Bible Hermeneutics and Gender in the European Context of the 18th Century” (March 9-13, 2020, Villa Vigoni)—a conference sponsored by the German-Italian Centre for European Excellence—and “(Ge)Schlechte(r) Religionswissenschaft!? Multidisziplinäre Ansätze einer kritischen Genderforschung zu Religion” (March 25-27, 2020, Ruhr-University Bochum). While not specific to eighteenth-century studies, this last conference promises a compelling study of the intersection between gender studies and religious studies. Czennia translated the conference title as “Gendered religious studies? Multidisciplinary approaches of critical gender research on religion” and explained that the parentheses in the original title “constitute a pun on ‘schlecht’ meaning ‘bad’ and ‘Geschlecht’ meaning ‘gender’ … so the title plays with prejudices against gender studies.” Many thanks to Dr. Czennia for her translations and explanations!

Also in the summer of 2019 was “Landscapes and Environment” (June 6-8, 2019), the conference for the History of Women Religious of Britain and Ireland (H-WRBI). Tonya J. Moutray (Russell Sage College) generously provided an extensive report on papers and panels related to the eighteenth century at H-WRBI. Please read that report further below.

But amid the cornucopia that was the eighteenth-century conference circuit this year, the biggest event was certainly ISECS. Held at the University of Edinburgh and organized by Brycchan Carey (Northumbria University) and a distinguished international committee, ISECS attracted over 1,600 scholars and featured almost 500 panels. 18 of those panels focused explicitly on religious content—from the shaping of sacred space to religious and irreligious identities; from religion in eighteenth-century Scotland to the role of the concept of salvation; from Catholicism to Moravianism; from secularization to toleration—ISECS included a constellation of religious perspectives. Dr. Daniel Fulda, one of the organizers of the “Place of Religion in the Enlightenment” conference, presented the final plenary address on “Pictures of the Enlightenment: Then and Now / Images des Lumières: à l’époque et de nos jours.” Yet despite ISECS being the largest of the eighteenth-century conferences, despite featuring a woman of color on the program cover, despite plenary sessions focused on global perspectives, cultural geography, and colonization, and despite a fascinating walking tour of “Black Edinburgh” curated by Dr. Lisa Williams of the Edinburgh Caribbean Association, even ISECS struggled to integrate non-Western, non-Christian perspectives. This lacuna is particularly noticeable given the influence of the Ottoman Empire on the Mediterranean in the early modern period and eighteenth century and given that European colonization, imperial expansion, and trade enterprises increased contact with (though not necessarily understanding of) non-Christian religions in South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Africa, and North and South America in the eighteenth century. Despite the efforts of a growing number of scholars, Western scholarship continues to be limited by its reliance on Eurocentric archives—a product of the dominance of English, German, and Romance languages in eighteenth-century studies. It can only be hoped that graduate schools in which these languages are dominant will encourage students to learn non-Western languages to enable the next generation of scholars to build multi-lingual and multi-cultural bridges across archives in the way that Michael Talbot (University of Greenwich) and Farish Noor (Nanyang Technological University) have done in their recent work on Anglo-Ottoman diplomacy and the political imagining of Southeast Asia in the “long” nineteenth century, respectively.

Brijraj Singh (Hostos Community College) provides below some thoughts on the hits and misses of attempts to make religious content “global” in eighteenth-century studies. His evaluation of panels at ISECS is an appropriate conclusion to a report on the role of religion in the global context of current eighteenth-century studies. Please see his report below. ISECS will be held in Rome in 2023.

2019 is drawing to a close, but the summer didn’t exhaust opportunities to learn more about religion in the eighteenth century. The Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (CSECS) and the Northeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (NEASECS0 joined for the conference “Éthique(s) des Lumières / Ethic(s) of/in the Enlightenment” in Québec, October 16-19.  Katherine Binhammer (University of Alberta) chaired a panel on “Religious Enlightenment(s) / Lumière(s) religieuse(s)” at which several individual papers were presented, including Norbert Puszkar (Austin Peay State University) on “Ethics, Religion and Revelation. Lessing’s ʻRing Parableʼ in Nathan the Wise” and Andrea Speltz (University of Waterloo) on “Religious (In)tolerance: Lessing’s Nathan the Wise at Stratford Festival 2019.” Katherine M. Quinsey (University of Windsor) spoke on “Augustan Theology and the Ethics of Animal Welfare.”

Shortly after CSECS/NEASECS, the East Central regional conference (EC/ASECS) celebrated its 50^th anniversary with the “Crossroads and Divergences” conference in Gettysberg, Pennsylvania (October 24-26, 2019). Mary Wellington (University of Mary Washington) chaired a panel on “Visitors and Voyeurs in Catholic Europe.” A month later, the UCLA Alpert School of Music hosted the symposium “You Imagine Me, and I Exist: The Afterlives of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695)” on Nov 22-23, 2019. The symposium coincided with the world premiere of Opera UCLA’s Juana. The opera is based on the novel Sor Juana’s Second Dream (1999) by Alicia Gaspar de Alba (UCLA); Gaspar de Alba and Carla Lucero (who also composed the music) wrote the libretto. In related news, the next SCSECS conference will be held in St. Augustine, Florida (February 7-8, 2020) and chairs are still seeking papers for panels on the Catholic Enlightenment, the Spanish American colonies, women and religion, and other religious content.

The current issue of SRE features perspectives on, or reviews of, Asia and orientalism (Kevin Cope, Jeffrey Galbraith); Western perceptions of the Qur’an (Siti Sarah Binte Daud); a diverse, multi-essay consideration of religion in the Enlightenment (Brijraj Singh); Roman Catholicism in late seventeenth-century Britain (Anne Barbeau Gardiner, Andrew Starkie); and the role of religion in the Scottish Enlightenment (Mark Spencer, Robin Mills). These reviews and commentaries serendipitously coincided with a year in which the importance of incorporating global perspectives increasingly became a concern on the conference circuit and in which ISECS was hosted in Edinburgh. The Scottish eighteenth century will continue to be at the forefront of scholarly conferences on eighteenth-century religion: the conference “Religion and the Scottish Enlightenment” will be held at Princeton next year (June 4-7, 2020). Please see below for the reports from Dr. Moutray and Dr. Singh.       ~ Sam Cahill

Report from Tonya J. Moutray

History of Women Religious of Britain and Ireland (H-WRBI), British Institute of Historical Research at the University of London, June 6-8, 2019.

“Landscapes and the Environment” was the theme of this year’s History of Women Religious of Britain and Ireland (H-WRBI) conference, which took place at the British Institute of Historical Research at the University of London, June 6 through 8.  The topic cast a wide net, bringing together historians, literary critics, archivists, and women religious into discussion about the landscape and environments of women religious. The research spanned from the medieval period to the present and included analyses of women’s communities outside of the U.K. and Ireland.

Caroline Bowden (Queen Mary University) began the conference with a delightful paper on “Gardens and Plants in the Convents of the Augustinian Canonesses in Exile 1600-1800.” Using blueprints, drawings, and watercolors of convent gardens and landscapes, Bowden analyzed three English Benedictine houses in Louvain, Bruges, and Paris, all of which were founded in the early seventeenth century. The significance of the garden spaces was threefold. First, gardens were used as spiritual spaces in which members could engage in devotional reading and meditation, as well as participate in religious rituals. Second, gardens had a practical purpose to provide food, including fruits and vegetables, and some dairy and meat, to the community. Food and other supplies also had to be brought in, as garden spaces for growing food or grazing animals were not large enough to support the community. Herbs were also grown in the “Apothecary Garden” so that medicines and teas could be made. Finally, the garden enabled physical health through recreation and work. Bowden also discussed the use of outbuildings located in the garden that served as infirmaries or additional housing, as well as instances in which workers and other outsiders were allowed into the garden. As a “liminal space,” connecting nuns to the outside world, the garden mediated the strictures of the Rule of Enclosure with the practicalities of real life.

The third session focused on the development of convent schooling in Ireland in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The research emphasized the mobility and adaptability of Irish women religious as they established numerous branches of their orders, and expanded their efforts across differing geographical and cultural topographies. Catherine Nowlan-Roebuck (University College Dublin) examined the development of Presentation convent schools under the direction of Hanora (Nano) Nago (1718-1784), whose religious institute, the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, became the largest provider of education to girls in Ireland. Nagle’s protégé, Teresa Mullaly, worked to further the order’s mission, developing a number of new foundations across Ireland after Nagle’s death. The expansion of the institute peaked from 1807 to 1830, with the development of 22 houses across 14 counties. Without resources to build separate schools, the Presentation sisters often used space within their homes to run their schools. Their focus on providing education to girls took precedence over waiting for funding to build schools or buy more property. The integration of schools within the convent, literally a “convent school,” posed logistical challenges for the sisters as they sought to remain enclosed. Despite these challenges, the sisters became leaders in girls’ education in Ireland in the nineteenth century.

Ruth Ferris and Deirdre Raftery (University College Dublin) presented on the Irish Loreto sisters who developed schools not only across Ireland, but globally, including Australia, India, and the U.S. Mother Mary Teresa Ball, (1795-1862) founded the first Dublin branch in 1821 and had been educated at the Bar Convent in York, a location rich with a history of subversive Catholic activity during Penal times. Both Ball and her successor, Mother Michael Corcoran (1846-1927), fourth superior General of the Loreto order, supported global missions and set about to expand their reach. Ball’s approach to establishing Catholic missions was “to follow the customs of the country,” enabling the sisters to integrate into radically different environments. Raftery discussed the ways mission life brought challenges for which the sisters were not prepared, and had almost no advance knowledge of, including tropical diseases. For example, the sisters’ work in India was very challenging with nuns struggling both in health and in cultural adaptation. The Loreto sisters’ challenges appear to have been fodder for Rumer Godden’s Black Narcissus (1939), which was brought to the screen in 1947. By the end of Corcoran’s leadership, sixteen convents had been established in India, a testament to the sheer determination of the Loreto Sisters to make foreign missions a success.

New methods of data collection and mapping were also explored, notably by Angelika Hansert (University of Maynooth). Her research traced and analyzed the geographical placement of religious houses in the archdiocese of Freiburg beginning in 1846 through the pre-Vatican II era. Using QGIS, an open-source geographical information system (GIS) application, Hansert mapped the growth of religious foundations across one region over this two hundred-year period, gaining insights into the strategies that enabled a successful enterprise to take root.

The conference concluded with a convent walk in London curated by Paul Shaw, archivist at St. Mary’s Convent in Middlesex. Shaw traced religious life in London from its Anglo-Saxon origins to the present day. The tour commenced at All Hallows By-The-Tower, founded by the Benedictine Abbey at Barking (7^th century). Other locations included the former site of St. Clare’s Abbey on The Minories (Medieval Franciscan convent), St. Helen’s Church, Bishopsgate, (Medieval Benedictine abbey), the Catholic Church of the English Martyrs, Tower Hill (the former site of two 19th-century women religious congregations, Poor Servants of the Mother of God, and the Sisters of the Holy Family of Bordeaux), and St. Aloysius Catholic Church, Somers Town, Camden. This latter location became home to émigré French priests during and after the French Revolution, one of whom, Abbé Guy Carron, founded St Aloysius’s church in 1808 to serve Catholic immigrants. In 1830 St. Aloysius’s Convent was established there by the Society of the Faithful Companions of Jesus (FCJ), an order founded at Amiens by Marie-Madeleine Victoire de Bengy, Vicomtesse de Bonnault d’Houet in 1820. She managed Carron’s parochial schools, and the order expanded globally and is currently active. The tour concluded at the new convent, school, and spirituality center in Somers Town, where FCJ sisters met with conference goers, sharing their legacy of collaborative ministries, including new programming focused on engaging community members in environmental reflection and activism.

 Report from Brijraj Singh

ISECS Congress, University of Edinburgh, July 14-19, 2019

 After being a conference goer for 35 years, I have learned a few things. First, many papers are delivered by scholars who are working towards a bigger project, and their presentations either summarize or are  part of their larger findings. If, through an exposition and analysis of one or two related issues which may in themselves not be very familiar to the audience, a significant argument is advanced or larger issues, whether literary, theoretical, or socio-political, raised, the papers tend to be successful, especially if they are cleanly constructed and delivered audibly and deliberately. Unfortunately, a few papers in this category fail either because they lack a larger context or because the speaker, conscious of time constraints, reads her text at breakneck speed, or in a voice which does not carry beyond the first few rows. The most memorable papers, however, do not necessarily try to say anything new. Rather, they take a bird’s eye view of a fairly extensive body of material and offer insights and relationships which put the topic being discussed in a context that raises important issues, either about the human experience or the practice of reading texts. What one takes away from such presentations is not information about a subject but ways of approaching it.

All these kinds of presentation were on display at the sessions of the ISECS Conference I attended. In a session on “Catholicism and the Enlightenment,” Ivo Cerman of the University of South Bohemia talked about “Catholic Criticism of Natural Law in Central Europe.” He argued that up to about 1743 philosophers, led mostly by lawyers, maintained that God had created natural law and men, through His inspiration, could discover and understand it. In various universities, especially Salzburg, it was maintained that man’s reason, itself God-given, was sufficient to uncover natural law. This attitude changed after 1743 when theologians started a counter offensive and argued the fallibility and inadequacy of reason. Thus the ceiling of a church near Prague has a picture of angels destroying books on natural law. The speaker did not explain why the change occurred after 1743, nor did he try to suggest what the consequences of this change were to Catholic theology.

Joanne Myers of Gettysburg College spoke on Catholic identity in eighteenth-century Britain. Her paper suggested that Catholics of the period were torn between loyalty to the State which was anti-Catholic, and an adherence to their faith in the face of all kinds of obstacles and hindrances imposed by the State. Discussing Richard Challoner’s two-volume Memoirs of Missionary Priests (1741, 42), she showed how he believed that the penal laws in effect against Catholics were so strict that they could be compared to believers being martyred. Yet, though they were martyred, as it were, they died loyal to the nation. Moving to William Maude’s diaries, she pointed out that he was a merchant who sheltered Challoner during the Gordon riots. Unlike Challoner, he said that penal laws treated Catholics lightly, a statement that was meant to show his support of the State. But he also recorded his regular presence at Mass. Indeed, his diaries have an almost excessive number of entries of the times he went to Mass. The speaker tried to theorize this excess by arguing that perhaps it was a way of his expressing rebellion against penal laws, even as he kept alluding to his loyalty to the king by insisting on the lightness of these laws. During Q & A one member of the audience drew attention to the fact  that some Catholic thinkers saw similarities between ideas, prevalent in China around the mid 18th century, that natural laws could be discussed by reason and the argument relating to natural law in Europe.

In a session on “Religion in Eighteenth-Century Scotland,” Stewart Brown of the University of Edinburgh gave a fine presentation on “Preaching the Scottish Enlightenment: Providence, History and Presbyterian Identity” in which he explored the symbiotic relationship between a group of Scottish Presbyterian Church members known as the Moderates and the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment. The Moderates preached tolerance and improvement. They emphasized personal morality as well as Church doctrine. Their main form of expression was sermons. They put forward a vision of a peaceful world of progress and benevolence. They looked to Anglican models, especially the sermons of Bishop Tillotson, for their preaching. William Leechman offered lectures on preaching; in 1777 Hugh Blair published a very popular collection of sermons. He subsequently brought out four more volumes and made a lot of money from them. The sermons of the Moderates emphasized divine providence in the progress of nations and civilizations. William Robertson made the point that God was actively involved in the world’s workings, and the progress or decline of nations was all part of God’s plan. In addition, the Moderates opposed slavery and encouraged missionary work. They also emphasized a certain humanity common to all people everywhere.

Through analyzing the views of the Moderates and showing their affinity with the ideals of the Scottish Enlightenment, the speaker was able to show how a religious movement, far from remaining confined within one church, became part of, and indeed to an extent instrumental in, the growth of a new and dynamic intellectual philosophy and helped shape the manners and morals of a nation.

Michael Kugler of Northwestern College, in a paper entitled “‘The Womb of Providence’: The Scottish Science of Human Nature as Physico-Theology and Theodicy,” maintained that by the eighteenth century natural philosophers had an explanation of the natural world which theologians then used to explain the workings of providence. They held that Nature symbolized the workings of God’s providence and could therefore be regarded as a divine contriver. They also saw the presence of evil as being itself part of God’s order in the universe. The speaker established these positions with the help of examples taken from the writings of two Scottish theologians, Bonnard and Adam Ferguson. In fact, as he pointed out, Ferguson started out as a teacher of natural philosophy, and his work expanded from there seamlessly into the realm of moral philosophy and theology.

The topic of Claire Loughlin (University of Edinburgh)’s paper was “Contesting ‘Popery’ in Eighteenth-Century Scotland: Liberty, Tyranny, and the Limits of Protestant Unity.” Her general argument was that “Popery” was not just Catholicism but a rhetorical trope representing tyranny, illiberality and control, and she examined the Marrow controversy to establish her point. Unfortunately she read her paper too fast for me to be able to take all her points in.

The final paper in the session was Paul Tonks (Yonsei University)’s “Articulating a Global Identity for the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Kirk: Robert Millar’s History of the Propagation of Christianity.” He said that for Millar education was the chief method for the spread of Christianity. Millar was more in favor of using local converts from among whom to choose pastors than sending missionaries out to the unconverted. He admired August Herman Francke’s work in Halle, both for its social dimension as well as for its support of missionaries. Millar’s work was highly popular among the working classes, and weavers, shoe makers and others subscribed to it heavily.

During Q & A, I was not quite able to make out the response to a question about the Catholic response to Protestant attacks on Popery. However,  Mr. Brown said that the Moderates were not totally opposed to Catholicism. They read and quoted from Catholic sources and treated them respectfully. In fact, there was a dynamic of attraction as well as repulsion between the Presbyterians and the Catholics.

Another point made had to do with the popularity of Millar’s work among the working classes. If more weavers subscribed to it at the end of the century than at the beginning, it was not that his popularity among them had grown but simply that there were more of them, and they were more important in Scotland by the end of the century than before.

It may not be inappropriate here for me to say something about my own presentation on “Ziegenbalg Debates the Hindus,” delivered at a session on India and the Enlightenment. Together with Heinrich Plutschau, Ziegenbalg is arguably the world’s first Protestant missionary, and did his work in Tranquebar in south India at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Two years after his arrival in India he was invited to a formal debate with a Hindu holy man; on a later occasion he got involved in an informal or impromptu debate with a number of Hindus. These two debates formed the subject of my paper. The first ended in a draw, but it taught him that his Tamil was good enough not only for him to understand his interlocutors but also to advance his religious views clearly. He learned, too, that though he made every effort to gather and study Hindu texts, the Hindus themselves were ignorant of them because the Brahmins, who owned them, refused to share them with others. This gave him a decided advantage. It also made him develop an anti-Brahmin attitude, which he realized was generally shared by the people, and this led him in subsequent debates to attack Brahmins frontally, accusing them of ignorance, immorality, and helping in the spread of superstition. He put these lessons to good use in the impromptu debate in which he won the assent of a number of his interlocutors.

In Q & A I discussed Ziegenbalg’s relationship with the Roman Catholics, which was antagonistic, and said that Plutschau was responsible for persuading the Danish governor that slaves, who were being brought up as Catholics, be sent to him and to Ziegenbalg for two hours of Protestant instruction daily and their children be brought up Protestant. In response to another question I said that Ziegenbalg was not interested in converting people for the sake of conversion. He wanted to make sure that they were truly committed to Christian doctrine and values, for which purpose he would catechize and examine them to make sure that they were sincere and their knowledge sound. The result was that he won very few converts; but though he built small, he built strong, and the Lutheran Church is thriving in south India today. I also discussed him briefly as a scholar of Tamil and of Hinduism, mentioning some of his translations of Tamil texts into German as a way of familiarizing audiences in the West with the best of Hindu thought. Finally, in response to another  question, I said that though his opposition to, and criticism of, Hinduism never abated, he came to appreciate its enormous power of creating myths, its creative energy, and its celebration of the variety of life.

Upcoming Conferences (2020)

BSECS, “Natural, Unnatural and Supernatural” (St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, UK, January 8-10, 2020)

https://www.bsecs.org.uk/conferences/annual-conference/

SCSECS, “The Speedy Enlightenment” (St. Augustine, Florida, February 7-8, 2020)

http://www.scsecs.net/scsecs/2020/2020_panels.html

ASECS (St. Louis, Missouri, March 19-21, 2020)

https://www.asecs.org/asecs-2020

ECSSS-ISSP, “Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Scotland” (Princeton Theological Seminary, New Jersey, June 4-7, 2020)

https://ecsss.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/pts-call-for-papers-2020.docx

History of Women Religious Britain and Ireland (Margaret Beaufort Institute, Cambridge, UK, July 2-3, 2020)

https://historyofwomenreligious.org/

Editorial Introduction by Samara Cahill
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2018.1.10
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Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment (SRE) is the online continuation of the print journal Religion in the Age of Enlightenment (RAE), formerly published by AMS Press. In 2017, RAE was abruptly forced to halt production, along with several other eighteenth-century journals, when AMS Editor-in-Chief Gabriel Hornstein passed away. Hornstein—or “Gabe,” as many knew him—had been a generous patron of eighteenth-century scholarship for decades. Gabe’s unique brand of patronage is irreplaceable and his passing sent shock waves through the eighteenth-century studies community.

The effects of Gabe’s loss are still being felt. Not only has the community lost a beloved friend and patron, but many journals have found it difficult to find a new home. From its first year, RAE responded to disaster—like many other journals—with fortitude and creativity. The genesis of RAE came to fruition through serendipitous moments of interpersonal connection, as the senior board members describe below. In the sociable web of global eighteenth-century studies, it has now found a home as Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment. SRE benefits from the support of two institutions that have stepped forward with time, manpower, and other resources to ensure that its vision continues: the Brigham Young University Faculty Publishing Service and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. I like to think that this digital resurrection is a moment of change in continuity.

The 2009 South Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (SCSECS) conference in Corpus Christi, Texas, crystallized what Religion in the Age of Enlightenment meant to many of us. The conference venue had shifted abruptly from Galveston to Corpus Christi due to the damage inflicted by Hurricane Ike in September 2008. It took five years for SCSECS to return to Galveston, in 2014. Yet somehow the conference in Corpus Christi was, as the SCSECS website called it, truly “effervescent”—a dynamic and bubbly celebration of fellowship in the midst of forces beyond human control.

I first met the RAE editorial leadership—Editor Brett McInelly and Book Review Editor Kathryn Duncan—in Corpus Christi. Brett and Kathryn were fortuitously on registration duty when I arrived and they immediately made me feel at home. Here were two established scholars who weren’t above investing their time and administrative labor for the good of their organization. Nor were they above chatting with an unseasoned graduate student. Fliers for the first volume of Religion in the Age of Enlightenment were on display at the registration table and I remember thinking how lovely it would be to be published in such a unique journal, one bringing an unusual and much-needed perspective to eighteenth-century studies. I couldn’t know it then—the 2008 financial crisis made it unlikely that I would be hired as a tenure-track faculty member—but that morning at the registration table with Brett and Kathryn set the tone for my professional career. They were, and are, incredibly generous mentors who modelled not only valuable editorial work, but also the can-do attitude of undertaking unglamorous administrative service in the aftermath of a natural disaster. Brett and Kathryn were there at the registration desk that morning to contribute to all levels of the eighteenth-century community, from graduate students to Keynote Speakers. I have always admired them and endeavoured to follow their examples.

SCSECS is meeting in Dallas in 2019 and it will mark the ten-year anniversary of that meeting with Brett and Kathryn—and of meeting other mentors associated with Religion in the Age of Enlightenment, particularly Kevin Cope, Baerbel Czennia, and other SCSECS board members. Many long-time SCSECS members were also associated with Religion in the Age of Enlightenment and they pulled together, just like after Hurricane Ike, when they heard the devastating news of the death of Gabe Hornstein and the collapse of AMS Press.

Continuing his work is a way of honouring Gabe’s memory and of remembering his benevolent influence on decades of eighteenth-century scholarship. Those of us who never knew him nevertheless benefitted from his love for, and support of, the profession and its people. Like Gabe, many of the board members of Religion in the Age of Enlightenment made a conscious commitment to guiding early career professionals, as Paul E. Kerry mentions below. As a recipient of that commitment, I can say with certainty that my career would never have survived without scholars—many of whom are on the SRE board—intervening when disaster threatened. I am grateful to be able to work with Brett, Brigham Young University’s Faculty Publishing Service, Nanyang Technological University’s Office of Information, Knowledge and Library Services (OIKLS), and the SRE board to continue the legacy of RAE in the digital environment. Gabe’s passing was a disaster for all of us but, like Hurricane Ike, devastation can strengthen a community. The eighteenth-century community is adept at responding to crisis, reaching out to old allies and new friends, and becoming stronger, richer, and more diverse in the midst of hardship. Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment will continue the legacy of Gabe and of Religion in the Age of Enlightenment: editorial commitment, administrative effort, and an investment in diverse perspectives. The spirit of Corpus Christi lives—and it welcomes all perspectives on religion in the “long” eighteenth century (1660-1832).

Transitions and adaptations are difficult moments requiring decisions to be made about what can stay and what must go. Happily, in the midst of disaster, the RAE and SRE boards have worked to ensure that Gabe’s vision, Brett’s vision, and the place of religion in eighteenth-century studies continue in a new online environment. With our inaugural issue, the SRE editorial team wanted to emphasize the deep continuities in this moment of transition. Senior board members of RAE have graciously shared their memories of Gabe Hornstein’s patronage, RAE’s development, and their thoughts about why the transition to SRE is a lasting expression of RAE’s vision. Please read further to share the memories and different perspectives of Kathryn Duncan, Paul E. Kerry, Kevin Cope, and Brett McInelly.

Our inaugural issue is dedicated to the memories of Gabe Hornstein, Diane Long Hoeveler, John Richardson, and Bob Tennant. They were generous and collegial members of the eighteenth-century community and brightened the lives of many scholars involved in the creation of SRE. They will be missed.

Memories of Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Kathryn Duncan, Saint Leo University
Book Review Editor, Religion in the Age of Enlightenment (2009-2014)

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment had long roots at AMS Press. The seeds were planted in 2005 when I edited a special edition of an AMS journal called Symbolism. The section that I edited had the title “Religion in the Age of Reason” and included essays exploring the largely overlooked but extremely important topic of religion in understanding the Enlightenment. Gabe Hornstein, president of AMS, asked me to take the essays from that special section along with new essays and publish a book called Religion in the Age of Reason: A Transatlantic Study of the Long Eighteenth Century, which AMS published in 2009. Again, Gabe felt there was more to be said. At the time, as the mother of a young child and with a heavy teaching load, I agreed, but said I couldn’t be the one to help say it.

Fortunately, I knew just the person: Brett McInelly. I’d known Brett through the South Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies for several years, knew of his scholarship in Methodism, and was confident that he would be the best editor Gabe could find to continue this important work. Brett agreed, asking me to serve as his book review editor, which I did through 2014 until Brett and I asked Samara Cahill to take over those duties, which she did with great efficiency and aplomb.

Sadly, Gabe’s death resulted in the closing of AMS Press. Gabe was a great friend to eighteenth-century studies, and both he and his contributions to the discipline are missed. Yet RAE will continue under a new title and with Brett and Sam’s tutelage. The journal finally will have an online presence that will give more scholars worldwide access. Those of us who have studied the eighteenth century from the perspective of religion know that while this time period is known for its secularism, the works most published were religious tracts and sermons. If anyone wishes to understand this vital, early-modern period, he/she must include the perspective of religion. Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment will serve that role. I am pleased and proud to continue to be involved with this work as a board member.

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Paul E. Kerry
Brigham Young University
Visiting Fellow, Centre for Theology, University of Oxford

I was a member of the editorial board for Religion in the Age of Enlightenment, and attracted by its mission to analyze the intellectually complex relationship between Enlightenment and religious discourses in the long eighteenth century. My role was to foster strong contributions from early career scholars and seek articles that engaged with topics and sources beyond the Anglophone world. This was enjoyable and useful service. It was a pleasure to help researchers new to the profession and benefitted and strengthened RAE. My most fulfilling experience of working with Brett McInelly occurred at a moment of gloom, when RAE’s publisher, AMS Press, collapsed. Brett now had an orphaned volume of RAE. I had helped to find several of the early career scholars, including international ones, who contributed to this volume and nurtured along their articles by finding competent peer reviewers. When Brett relayed the dolorous news, he noted that a few of the contributors were counting on this publication for their tenure application files. Furthermore, there was a piece by Bob Tennant, an active and industrious scholar in the field, who had passed away during the publication process. Brett and I flew into action, motivated by a sense of rescue, of not wanting this project to fall to pieces to the disappointment of all. It is highly satisfying to report that after some effort to find a suitable publisher and hard work to meet new specifications, we were able to place the entire volume and the book is now published.

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Kevin Cope
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge
Editor, 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

None of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales begins with “once upon a time there was no religion,” but that version of the famed storytelling brothers’ standard opening describes long-eighteenth-century studies at the time of the founding of Religion in the Age of Enlightenment. To be sure, the carousel of then-current scholarly approaches, whether war-weary cultural materialism or the various predecessors of what we now call gender studies or the sprouts of ecocriticism or plain old multi-disciplinarity, circled around the study of faith, belief, theology, and ritual.  Occasionally some retiring deconstructionist would notice that Dr. Johnson now and then muttered a few prayers.  Yet scholars, most of whom worked in public institutions in which god-populated religion had been secularized into tame, softly anthropological “religious studies,” remained reluctant to focus on the history of faith.  This awkward timidity presented an opportunity:  who would put reputation, career, and perhaps sanity at risk to recognize the inescapable fact of the religiosity of the Enlightenment—to admit that almost everyone in the long eighteenth century either practiced a religion or articulated religious ideas or at least paid lip service to angels, demons, and, in sum, everything in view of St. Peter’s gate?

In this context, and shortly after the turn of the new millennium, conversations began concerning the possibility of a journal that would take an unrepentant interest in the purveyors of penitence:  in the myriad manifestations of religious conviction during an era that prided itself on revising or updating almost everything.  Long an enthusiast for anything comfortably arcane—for culturally cordial productions such as emblem books, travel journals from the holy land, or extracts from complex religious controversies, but not for impolite zombies, nuisance ghosts, or anything ghoulish—AMS Press impresario and telephone aficionado Gabriel Hornstein called me and likely a thousand others seeking advice about starting a journal limited to religion but open to any and all scholarly approaches.  The response:  an almost universal enthusiasm from those who hoped to be at long last liberated to talk about this most unexplored of topics.  The nominee for the job: Founding Editor Brett McInelly, already established as the most ecumenical of scholars owing to his renowned studies of early Methodism, his placement in an American church-affiliated institution, and his reputation as the freest of thinkers.  The rest is—if we dare use the “e” and “s” words—an academic version of eschatological and soteriological history.  A veritable “field of folk” contributed study after study on fascinating and occasionally offbeat topics while circulation swelled.  Now RAE leads the way, if not yet into the spiritual world, then into the slightly spiritualized electronic zone as it takes on a new title and new life as the premier online journal in its field!

*

Brett C. McInelly
Brigham Young University
Editor, Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
Senior Editorial Advisor, Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment

While attending the South Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies’ annual conference in New Orleans in 2008, I was approached by the late Gabriel Hornstein, president of AMS Press, about launching a scholarly annual devoted to the study of religious topics during the Long Eighteenth Century. Despite my trepidations taking on such a project, I enthusiastically accepted his invitation to serve as editor, believing that such an annual was long overdue. I was also aware of AMS Press’s long-standing commitment to academic publishing generally and eighteenth-century studies specifically and that that commitment, coupled with some sweat equity, could make such an annual a reality. The culmination of my conversation with Gabe was Religion in the Age of Enlightenment (RAE), the first volume of which appeared in 2009. The fifth and final volume appeared in 2015. Volume 6 was press ready when AMS shut its doors in early 2017 following Gabe’s passing, and I’m pleased to report that the majority of the articles that were originally included in volume 6, along with a handful of other articles slated for a later volume, recently appeared in a collection edited by myself and Paul E. Kerry entitled New Approaches to Religion and the Enlightenment (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2018). I’m equally delighted to see the spirit of RAE revived in Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment, and I thank Samara Cahill and Nanyang Technological University for their efforts in continuing to provide a forum for scholarly conversations about the provocative and compelling ways in which religion and enlightenment intersected and informed the other during the Long Eighteenth Century.

I would be remiss if I did not take this opportunity to express my heart-felt thanks to RAE’s editorial board for years of dedicated service and support as well as the two outstanding individuals who served as book review editors, Kathryn Duncan and Samara Cahill. I express my appreciation to the contributors whose work ultimately defined RAE and to Melvin J. Thorne and Suzy Bills of the Brigham Young University Faculty Publishing Service and their team of student editors for their help with copyediting, design, and the layout of the journal. Finally, I thank Gabe Hornstein and AMS Press for their commitment to RAE and eighteenth-century studies.