Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T08:59:18.417Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Innocence Abroad: The “American Religion” in Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

William R. Hutchison
William R. Hutchison
Affiliation:
This presidential address was delivered at the annual meeting of the American Society of Church History, 28 December 1981. Mr. Hutchison is Charles Warren professor of the history of religion inAmerica in Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Americans pondering cultural relationships to Europe have always rather enjoyed quoting that splendidly splenetic outburst of rhetorical questions that the Reverend Sydney Smith posed in 1820 in the Edinburgh Review: “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons?” As Smith's catalogue continues, it becomes Job-like; or rather, by no accident, like God's questions to poor Job. Where were the Americans, Smith thunders, when we British laid the foundations of modern culture? “Where are their Foxes, their Burkes, their Sheridans?… What new substances have their chemists discovered? What new constellations have been discovered by [their] telescopes?”

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , March 1982 , pp. 71 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1982

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Edinburgh Review 65 (01 1820): 79–80.Google Scholar For aid of several kinds in the preparation of this address, the author thanks Mark Massa, George Huntston Williams, and the members of the Colloquium in American Religious History, Harvard University. The paper is dedicated to the memory of Elizabeth Williams Miller, who died 20 January 1982.

2. Nippold, Friedrich, Handbuch des Neuesten Kirchengeschichte seit der Restauration von 1814 (Elberfeld, 1867).Google Scholar

3. Bargy, Henry, La Religion dans la Société aux Étas-Unis (Paris, 1902), pp. vii–x.Google Scholar

4. Moody, Joseph, “The French Catholic Press of the 1840s on American Catholicism,” Catholic Historical Review 60 (07 1974): 185–214;Google ScholarWangler, Thomas, “The Birth of Americanism: ‘Westward the Apocalyptic Candlestick’, ” Harvard Theological Review 65 (07 1972): 415–436;CrossRefGoogle Scholaridem, “American Catholic Expansionism, 1886–1894,” ibid., forthcoming.

5. Quoted in Dan, Herr and Joel, Wells, eds., Through Other Eyes (Westminster, Md., 1965), pp. 12–13.Google Scholar

6. Wilberforce, Samuel, A History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America (New York, 1849), pp. 290–291.Google Scholar

7. Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country 12 (10 and 11 1835): 464, 584, 575.Google Scholar

8. Schaff, Philip, Amerika (Berlin, 1858), p. viii;Google ScholarSchaff, David S., The Life of Philip Schaff (New York, 1897), p. 186.Google Scholar

9. Schaff, David, Life of Philip Schaff, p. 75.Google Scholar

10. Fogarty, Gerald, The Vatican and the Americanist Crisis (Rome, 1974), p. 142.Google Scholar

11. Schaff, Philip, Amerika, p.79.Google Scholar The 1855 English translation can be found in Perry, Miller, ed., America (Cambridge, Mass. 1961), p. 94.Google Scholar

12. Ibid., pp. 79–80, (English ed., p. 95). See also the views of Newman and other Tractarians in Herklots, H. G., The Church of England and the American Episcopal Church (London, 1966), pp. 130–133.Google Scholar

13. Bryce, James, The American Commonwealth, rev. ed., 2 vols. (New York, 1910), 2: 794.Google Scholar

14. Maignen, Charles, “A French View of Religion in America” [a review of Bargy], The Review (Saint Louis), 14 05 1903, pp. 289–292.Google Scholar

15. Maignen, Charles, Father Hecker—Is He a Saint?, English ed. (Rome, 1898), pp. xviii, 51.Google Scholar

16. Stephenson, George M., The Religious Aspects of Swedish Immigration (Minneapolis, 1932), pp. 24, 39.Google Scholar The new Swedish pietism, “obnoxious to the high-church people … caused them to look askance at the Augustana Synod and anything that suggested America, the land of sects, a godless land that in its ignorance of the Word of God had dispensed with so many things dear to the man who elevated forms… above spontaneity” (ibid., p. 48).

17. Hogg, W. Richey, Ecumenical Foundations (New York, 1952), pp. 64–66.Google Scholar

18. Ibid., pp. 62, 66–67; Ecumenical Missionary Conference, 2 vols. (New York, 1900), 1: 290–291.Google Scholar

19. Hopkins, C. Howard, John R. Mott (Geneva, 1979), pp. 232, 252, 359,Google Scholar stresses the efforts of American leaders to conciliate Warneck, for example in a visit by Mott and Wilder in 1899. The Warneck speech of 1900 and the statements a year later in his revised History of Protestant Missions, Eng. ed., (New York, 1903), pp. 112–115,Google Scholar show that the German leader, while discriminating in his judgments, continued to oppose the “wholesale driving” of the Americans, and particularly their notorious “rhetorical phrase.” See also Hopkins, p. 577.

20. Hogg, p. 103.

21. Frick, Heinrich, Die Evangelische Mission (Bonn, 1922), pp. 352–429.Google Scholar

22. Cited in Allan, Nevins, ed., America Through British Eyes [1923] (Gloucester, Mass., 1968), p.5.Google Scholar

23. Frick, , Evangelische Mission, pp. 352–353, 369–376.Google Scholar Latourette's version of the Versailles matter is almost a mirror image of Frick's but, sad to say, was penned over 30 years later for inclusion in a major history of ecumenism that is still very much in use. The Germans ought to have been grateful, Latourette implies, that their missions were not converted to reparations payments. “Instead of rejoicing that property worth between three and four million pounds had been saved for the missionary cause,” they persisted in regarding clause 438 “as a dark design to bring German missions under Allied control, and in suspecting their friends of having betrayed them—a remarkable example of the extent to which the judgment of even Christian men can be distorted by feelings in a time of deep distress” (in Rouse, Ruth and Neill, Stephen, eds., A History of the Ecumenical Movement, 1517–1948, 2d ed. [London, 1967], p. 365).Google Scholar

24. Author's conversations, beginning in 1976, with Professor Hans-Werner Gensichen of Heidelberg and with Professor and Mrs. Helmut Koester of Harvard.

25. In Rouse, and Neill, , Ecumenical Movement, pp. 550–551, 554.Google Scholar

26. Frick, , “Echo auf Stockholm,” Christliche Welt, 17 12 1925, pp. 1188–1190;Google ScholarRohr, Heinz, Der Einfluss der Religionswissenschajt auf der Missions- Theorie Heinrich Fricks (Ph.D. diss., Marburg/Lahn, 1959), p. 89.Google Scholar

27. Author's conversation with W. A. Visser't Hooft, 17 March 1976.

28. In Rouse, and Neill, , Ecumenical Movement, pp. 554–555.Google Scholar

29. Brunner, Emil, Reformation und Romantik (Munich, 1925), p. 26.Google Scholar

30. Deissman, Adolph, Die Stockholmer Bewegung (Berlin, 1927), p. 94.Google Scholar

31. Müller and Cordier are cited in Hooft, W. A. Visser't, The Background of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism (Haarlem, 1928), p. 10.Google Scholar

32. Wallau, Rene-Heinrich, Die Einigung der Kirche (Berlin, 1925), pp. 246–252.Google Scholar