An Emancipation of the Mind

Starred review from February 5, 2024
In this enthralling and muscular study, historian and philosopher Stewart (The 9.9 Percent) examines the German radicals who inspired a generation of antislavery leaders in 19th-century America. Tracing how the secularist, rational, and atheistic philosophies of Ludwig Feuerbach, G.W.F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant, and David Friedrich Strauss traveled across the ocean and found a home with leading lights of the abolitionist movement (including Frederick Douglass and Theodore Parker), Stewart contends that this radical philosophical vision, which had somewhat influenced the American Revolution, had in the years since “dissipated under the growing pressure of a counterrevolutionary slaveholding oligarchy.” After the failure of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, however, a cadre of well-educated, German-speaking “hard-liners” (around 10,000 people in total) immigrated to the U.S., carrying with them ideas that revitalized American revolutionary principles—especially the notion that all men are created equal, which Stewart argues came into direct conflict with the slaveholders’ coopted branch of American Christianity that explicitly promoted racial hierarchy. Stewart brings this intellectual battle into the present, forcefully rebutting what he considers insidious recent historiography that paints Lincoln as a “Bible-believing Christian” and boldly stating that the slaveholders’ Christian nationalism “clearly anticipates the fascist and neo-fascist movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” It’s a vital reassessment of what underpins American democracy.

Starred review from February 15, 2024
Equality, humanity, and power were at the heart of America's second founding. In Nature's God, Stewart examined the ideological and theological underpinnings of America's founding fathers. Now turning to what he calls the nation's second revolution, the Civil War, he offers a deeply researched history of the philosophical bonds that linked three monumental figures of the time: Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Theodore Parker. The author argues persuasively that the "radical philosophical vision that originated in early modern Europe" fueled both the American Revolution and the widespread European revolutions of 1848 and then tracked back across the Atlantic. Stewart closely examines the role of religion in antebellum America, when a "theology of the propertied classes" emerged as a justification for slavery and for the violent treatment of the enslaved. Douglass called religious slaveholders "the worst." Piously citing scripture as justification, Confederate states proposed a Christian Republic with "benevolent Christian masters and grateful Christian slaves." In the North, not immune to racism, none of the major religious denominations "endorsed abolition before the war broke out." Abolitionists were branded as infidels. The Civil War, then, was more than a conflict over slavery; it pitted self-proclaimed God-fearing white Americans against religious skeptics like Lincoln and nonbelievers like Parker. The war also laid bare the pervasiveness of insidious economic inequality, not only between whites and Blacks, but between white oligarchs, owners of huge cotton plantations, and the middle class and poor whites who made up the rest of the country's population. Slavery, Stewart asserts, "is best understood as a device through which the propertied exploit the entire nation by mobilizing one part of society to enforce the oppression of another at the expense of both." After the war, proslavery theology led to a conservative counterrevolution that still permeates Christian nationalism and the religious right. A sweeping, penetrating historical narrative.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.