Statistics point to a “surge” in evangelical publications as well as in the practices of evangelical piety in the first half of the nineteenth century. In order to explain these parallel trends, however, mere measurement falls short in adequately addressing the strange power evangelical media institutions assumed during this period. In 1825, for example, the American Tract Society announced its agenda of “systematic organization,” a directive that applied equally, and simultaneously, to words on the page, to readers on the ground, and to the airy abstractions of the nation-state.

In his correspondence with the Corinthian community, the Apostle Paul addressed the problem of factionalism, his criticism aimed particularly against a faction of educated members who regarded their knowledge as evidence of social superiority. He countered these types of claims to superiority by proposing a dichotomy of wisdoms—“the wisdom of this world” and “God's wisdom”:

It was with a flourish of grace-borne optimism that Thomas Hooker opened his massive redaction of a career's worth of “preparationist” theology, the posthumously published Application of Redemption. The sermons in which this two-volume work consists were published in London in 1656, under the editorial direction of the Independent divines Thomas Goodwin and Philip Nye, but had been preached in New England in the aftermath of the “free-grace controversy” of the mid-1630s and rewritten by Hooker in the 1640s in order to “refine and expand” his previous explications of soul work. Setting concerned sights upon old England's luxuriant antinomian problem, Goodwin and Nye turned to Hooker, late of Chelmsford and Connecticut, in hopes that a strong dose of spiritual discipline might restore moral order to a disordered land. The God of the preparationists, it has been remarked, contributed centrally to an “emerging culture of stamina and rigor”; by the 1650s, however, the God who made his orderly favors known “by a long procession of hints, of interpretable suggestions” had relinquished the reins of moral control. None was better qualified than Hooker to interrogate fault for the sake of the regaining of favor.

Recent works of modern French history have found it fashionable, when focusing on the eighteenth century from across the jagged shoals of nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, to reductively treat Francophone national identity as the dialogical interaction of two related “imagined communities.” On the one hand, as scholars such as Joseph Byrnes have unconvincingly argued, French national identity after the Enlightenment and Revolutionary eras has been shaped by the more secular “Cult of the Nation,” nourished by the Revolutionary ethos of liberté, égalité, and fraternité; on the other hand, there is the identity of France as Europe's first, most Catholic people. Such stark contrasts between opposing identities, which were in fact self-consciously nourished and cultivated by nineteenth-century writers, are overdrawn, and yet the increasingly dialogical character of French national identity in the centuries after the Revolution remains relevant to the subject of eighteenth-century historiography, for the definition of French national identity or identities is intricately intertwined with the unfolding of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment identities that arose in various nuanced forms from the intellectual and religious history of France. Recently, provocative and timely work by Jonathan Israel, Dale Van Kley, and Darrin McMahon has taken up different aspects of these broader questions concerning why and when these competing visions may have sprung from the soil of eighteenth-century France. A remaining historiographical curiosity lingers as many historians of the French Revolution are quick to ascribe this dichotomy chiefly to the years after 1791 when the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the Oath of Allegiance made allegiance to the Revolutionary government more complicated for less Gallican, more ultramontane priests. On the other hand, historians of the French Enlightenment continue to focus on the inherently secular, scientific, and anticlerical nature of the siècle de lumières as though the Church were inevitably opposed to Enlightenment innovations after mid-century, preferring and harshly defending (as Jonathan Israel has recently and voluminously argued) a comfortable and cautious acceptance of Lockeanism and Newtonianism as the only forms of Enlightenment discourse considered acceptable and capable of synthesis with Catholic orthodoxy. Differing historical perspectives on the relationship between the Enlightenment and religion remain central to the identity of participants in the French Enlightenment at various points throughout the eighteenth century and after, and such questions continue to inform the definition of what it means to be “French” today. As such, the historical processes of Enlightenment identity formation continue to require examination; such processes—one of many lietmotifs within the complex and invaluable conversations opened by the works of Israel, McMahon, and Van Kley—will be the subject of this article. For scholars remain far from a consensus on just what it meant to be Catholic and Enlightened together in the century preceding the French Revolution.

The autobiography of Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797) offers an unusual portrait of the dynamic relationship between scripture and colonialism. In 1789 Equiano, who also went by the name Gustavus Vassa, related his experience of slavery to support abolitionism in Britain in the form of a best-selling, two-volume autobiography titled The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. Equiano's autobiography comprises a striking description of religion and culture among the Igbo of West Africa, the nation with which he identified by birth. According to Equiano, the Igbo were descended from ancient Jews, and their religion was a modern survival of ancient biblical religion. This claim, seemingly casual at first, is actually a complicated maneuver that reveals how deeply he had mined a trove of biblical commentary to shape his interesting narrative for a skeptical readership. The early modern genre of biblical commentary, which was deeply influenced by the exigencies of European colonialism, constitutes in its own right an authoritative literature that proved quite useful for Equiano.