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Many Americans wish to believe that the United States, founded in religious tolerance, has gradually and naturally established a secular public sphere that is equally tolerant of all religions — or none. Culture and Redemption suggests otherwise. Tracy Fessenden contends that the uneven separation of church and state in America, far from safeguarding an arena for democratic flourishing, has functioned instead to promote particular forms of religious possibility while containing, suppressing, or excluding others. At a moment when questions about the appropriate role of religion in public life have become trenchant as never before, Culture and Redemption radically challenges conventional depictions — celebratory or damning — of America’s “secular” public sphere.Examining American legal cases, children’s books, sermons, and polemics together with popular and classic works of literature from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, Culture and Redemption shows how the vaunted secularization of American culture proceeds not as an inevitable by-product of modernity, but instead through concerted attempts to render dominant forms of Protestant identity continuous with democratic, civil identity. Fessenden shows this process to be thoroughly implicated, moreover, in practices of often-violent exclusion that go to the making of national culture: Indian removals, forced acculturations of religious and other minorities, internal and external colonizations, and exacting constructions of sex and gender. Her new readings of Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Stowe, Twain, Gilman, Fitzgerald, and others who address themselves to these dynamics in intricate and often unexpected ways advance a major reinterpretation of American writing

American literature --- Christianity and culture --- Religion and literature --- Secularism --- History and criticism. --- United States --- Church history. --- History and criticism --- Church history --- Secularism - United States --- Christianity and culture - United States --- American literature - History and criticism --- Religion and literature - United States --- United States - Church history

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English fiction --- American fiction --- Bible and literature. --- Religion and literature --- History and criticism --- History --- Bible --- In literature --- -Bible --- -Bible and literature. --- -Religion and literature --- -82-97 --- Literature --- Literature and religion --- Literature and the Bible --- American literature --- English literature --- History and criticism. --- In literature. --- Religieuze literatuur --- Moral and religious aspects --- 82-97 Religieuze literatuur --- Bible and literature --- 82-97 --- Biblia --- English fiction - History and criticism --- American fiction - History and criticism --- Religion and literature - England - History --- Religion and literature - United States - History