To Walk the Earth Again: The Politics of Resurrection in Early America

This book explores the political dimension of Anglo-American Protestant writing about the future resurrection of the dead between the seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Reading histories, epic poetry, funeral sermons, and scientific tracts alongside works of eschatological exegesis, the book challenges the conventional scholarly assumption that Protestantism’s rejection of purgatory prepared the way for the individualization and secularization of Western attitudes toward mortality. A deeper engagement with the complex history of resurrection theology reveals the importance of collective solidarity with the dead for Protestant social and political thought. Puritans, Anglicans, Quakers, and radicals looked to resurrection to understand their communities’ prospects in the uncertain terrain of colonial America. They also expressed their conviction that political identities and religious duties did not expire with the mortal body but were carried over into the next life. This belief shaped their positions on a wide variety of issues, including the limits of ecclesiastical and civil power, the relationship of humanity to the natural world, and the emerging rhetoric of racial difference. In the early national and antebellum periods, secular and Christian reformers drew on the idea of resurrection to imagine how American republicanism might transform society and politics and ameliorate the human form itself. Early-modern Protestants really believed that they would live again in the flesh. By taking this belief seriously, this book opens up new perspectives on their mutually constitutive visions of earthly and resurrected existence.