¹ Brown, Charles Brockden, Wieland, or The Transformation, ed. Bryan Waterman (repr. New York: Norton, 2011; first published 1798)Google ScholarPubMed. Subsequent references to this edition are made parenthetically within the text.

² Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 3Google Scholar.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid., 22, 4.

⁵ Barnes, Elizabeth, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 45Google Scholar, describes the standard didacticism of novels in eighteenth-century America: “The typical American novel of seduction follows a line of British literature devoted to the instruction of young people, especially women, in proper manners and morals.” Novels within the tradition usually feature protagonists of heightened sensibility who are thereby “complicit in their own destruction.”

⁶ Barnard, Philip, Kamrath, Mark L., and Shapiro, Stephen, ed., Revising Charles Brockden Brown: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality in the Early Republic (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004), xvGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Ibid., xii.

⁸ Religious historian Jon Butler similarly critiques Wieland scholars for overlooking the novel's pluralistic depiction of religion in Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). Because of his project's broad historical scope, Butler alludes to Wieland only momentarily. Nevertheless he aptly identifies the critical oversight that I address in this essay, suggesting in his work the need for a more sustained analysis of the characters' faiths and the discourses that disrupt them. For examples of scholarship treating Brown and the Illuminati scare, see Waterman, Bryan, Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; and Bradshaw, Charles C., “The New England Illuminati: Conspiracy and Causality in Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland,” New England Quarterly, 76, 3 (2003), 356–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I build upon Waterman and Bradshaw's insights into Brown's engagement with the Illuminati crisis to account for the religious environment of the late eighteenth-century mid-Atlantic more widely.

⁹ Tompkins, Jane, Sensational Designs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 57Google Scholar, contends that Wieland Sr. dies a “victim of a God of his own devices,” which “extends the critique of Calvinist theology which … the novel offers.”

¹⁰ Judson, Barbara, “A Sound of Voices: The Ventriloquial Uncanny in Wieland and Prometheus Unbound,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 44, 1 (2010), 21–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 21, 22, focusses specifically on the novel's replacement of Calvinist theology with a psychology of the unconscious; for her the “Puritan act of self-examination” resurfaces in Brown's fiction as the “secular gothic” habit of self-scrutiny. An additional critical subgroup has focussed on Brown's investment in emerging legal definitions of guilt and agency in the early republic. Michael T. Gilmore addresses the tension between these definitions and Calvinist doctrines of sin and atonement directly in “Calvinism and Gothicism: The Example of Brown's Wieland,” Studies in the Novel, 9, 2 (1977), 107–18. He theorizes that Clara suffers because, until the novel's end, she uses legal language to deny her innate depravity. The tension Gilmore acknowledges between the law and Calvinism in Wieland forms the absent center of Marcia Nichols and Laura Korobkin's more recent readings, which draw attention to the legal articulations of guilt and agency in the novel, but not their theological counterparts. See Nichols, Marcia, “Cicero's Pro Cluentio and the ‘Mazy’ Rhetorical Strategies of Wieland,” Law and Literature, 20, 3 (2008), 459–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Korobkin, Laura H., “Murder by Madman: Criminal Responsibility, Law, and Judgment in Wieland,” American Literature, 72, 4 (2000), 721–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ Jon Butler argues that “quite contrary to Cotton Mather's well-known (and well-justified) fears, the story of religion in America after 1700 is one of Christian ascension rather than declension – Christianization rather than dechristianization – and of a Christianity so complex and heterogeneous as to baffle observers and adherents alike.” Butler, 2.

¹² Porterfield, Amanda, Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³ Clara switches between past and present verb tenses in her narrative to distinguish between thoughts and reactions she had in the moment of the events she narrates and those she experiences now as she looks back to record them. Of course, even the thoughts and attitudes that Clara attributes to her past self are the products of her present consciousness. Nevertheless, acknowledging that Clara articulates questions about motive, guilt, and agency almost exclusively in the past tense draws attention to an important distance she places between these and her current concerns.

¹⁴ Taylor, A Secular Age, 32, 30.

¹⁵ Ibid., 11.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Finke, Roger and Stark, Rodney, The Churching of America, 1776–2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 22Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Hatch, Nathan O., The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 4Google Scholar.

¹⁹ The Episcopalian Church was established in New York, Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, and North and South Carolina. The Congregationalists were established in New England. Finke and Stark, 43, 26.

²⁰ Ibid., 55.

²¹ This was despite or perhaps more likely because of Pennsylvania never having had an established church. The only state with a higher rate of adherence, New Jersey, also did not have an established state religion. Adherence rates were lowest in the southern colonies, where large slave populations were infrequently involved and often forcibly excluded from organized churches. Ibid., 31.

²² Porterfield, Conceived in Doubt, 79.

²³ This was especially true along the western frontier, where communities often lacked the resources to support well-educated clergymen from formerly established churches, who were accustomed to being well paid. Finke and Stark, 66.

²⁴ Porterfield, 147.

²⁵ Jefferson, Thomas, Notes on the State of Virginia (repr. New York: W. W. Norton, 1954; first published 1787), 159Google Scholar.

²⁶ Religious historians offer different interpretations of the relationship between Jeffersonian politics and religious pluralization. Nathan O. Hatch, at 9, speaks of the “democratization of American Christianity,” a clear reference to the populist energies he sees fueling religion's pluralization on a ground level. Amanda Porterfield challenges Hatch's narrative, arguing that the emergence of mass politics and a turn toward a libertarian philosophy of civil government at the start of the nineteenth century threw Americans into a state of doubt, which evangelical religion used to fuel its growth.

²⁷ Modern, John Lardas, Secularism in Antebellum America: With Reference to Ghosts, Protestant Subcultures, Machines, and Their Metaphors; Featuring Discussions of Mass Media, Moby-Dick, Spirituality, Phrenology, Anthropology, Sing Sing State Penitentiary, and Sex with the New Motive Power (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press), 2Google Scholar.

²⁸ Taylor, A Secular Age, 3.

²⁹ Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 214.

³⁰ Many scholars of American religious history refer to the resurgence of evangelicalism and revivalism after the Revolutionary War as the Second Great Awakening, and suggest that it took place between 1805 and 1820. Butler, 221, challenges this interpretation, offering evidence that their growth began as early as the end of the Revolutionary War.

³¹ Porter, Roy, Mind-Forg'd Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 42Google Scholar.

³² Butler perceives Clara and her family's idiosyncratic faith as somewhat of a representative case of American religion at the turn of the nineteenth century. He writes that, despite Wieland's underestimation of the impact of religious individualism in the following centuries, the novel keyed into an “extraordinary range” of religious interests in the period, including divine interventionism, dreams, visions, and ghosts. The Wielands' Protestantism was emblematic of the “dramatic American syncretism that wedded popular supernaturalism with Christianity.” Butler, 226.

³³ Of course, Wieland Sr.'s insistence on the rights of individuals to their private religious beliefs echoes Thomas Jefferson's defense of private religious freedom in Notes on the State of Virginia.

³⁴ Tracy Fessenden proposes in Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 6, that the supposed secularization of America's public sphere has created space not for religious pluralism, but rather for a more subtle and pervasive Protestantism, brought about by the gradual blurring of the lines separating Protestant values from America's values as a civil democracy. This Protestant secularism has become the “unmarked category” in American religious and literary history.

³⁵ Robinson, Nicholas, A New System of the Spleen, Vapours, and Hypochondriack Melancholy: Wherein All the Decays of the Nerves, and Lownesses of the Spirits, are Mechanically Accounted For… (London, 1729), 245Google Scholar.

³⁶ Blackmore, Richard, A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours: or, Hypocondriacal and Hysterical Affections (London, 1725), 158Google Scholar.

³⁷ According to Rush, not only is the body formed in God's image, but God is also the “exciting power” that acts upon the body and instills life in it. This power travels through the blood. If it is unevenly distributed, the body becomes diseased. Benjamin Rush's Lectures on the Mind, ed. Eric T. Carlson, Jeffrey L. Wollock, and Patricia S. Noel (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1981), 56, 59. I borrow the term “religious materialist” from Carlson, Jeffery, and Noel's introduction to Rush's lecture. Rush himself resisted the term “materialist,” which he associated with atheism, despite openly acknowledging that he sought the material causes of mental diseases. Ibid., 382.

³⁸ Rush, Benjamin, Medical Inquiries and Observations, on the Diseases of the Mind (repr. Birmingham: Classics of Medicine Library, 1979; first published 1812), 45Google Scholar.

³⁹ Ibid.

⁴⁰ Brown's reference in his novel, via a footnote, to the eighteenth-century physician Erasmus Darwin's Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life (1794) points to his attentiveness to the expanding medical discourses of his age.

⁴¹ Robinson, 236. The association of religious melancholy with an obsession over salvation and the state of one's soul implies a critique of “Old Light” Calvinism, with its characteristic doctrines of predestination and limited atonement.

⁴² Blackmore, 158.

⁴³ Rush, Medical Inquiries, 137; Robinson, 246.

⁴⁴ Robinson, 246.

⁴⁵ Clara reads Wieland's confession in the presence of her uncle Mr. Cambridge, a man “skilled as a reasoner as well as a physician” (131). Mr. Cambridge urges Clara to accept that Wieland suffered from a mental disease. He asks her, “Can you doubt … that these were illusions? Does heaven, think you, interfere for such ends?” (133). Mr. Cambridge also pushes Clara to attribute her father's death to natural causes (18).

⁴⁶ Robinson, 241.

⁴⁷ Rush, Medical Inquires, 138.

⁴⁸ Rush approaches the scientific study of the human body as the highest form of Christian reverence. He opens one of his lecture series, “I feel as if I were about to enter into a temple of a Deity.” Rush, Lectures on the Mind, 67.

⁴⁹ Taylor, A Secular Age, 33.

⁵⁰ Southcomb, Lewis, Peace of Mind and Health of Body United: or, a Discourse, Shewing the Distinction between a Wounded Conscience, Convicted by a Sense of Sin, and a Wounded Spirit, Proceeding from a Disordered Body (London, 1750), 4Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Clara writes, “All that I have said is preparatory to this scene” (164).

⁵² When Clara's uncle asks her what natural or supernatural power she blames for her brother's crimes, she answers, “I know not. All is wildering conjecture. I cannot forget Carwin. I cannot banish the suspicion that he was the setter of these snares” (133).

⁵³ Norwood, Lisa West, “‘I May Be a Stranger to the Grounds of Your Belief’: Constructing Sense of Place in Wieland,” Early American Literature, 38, 1 (2003), 89–122CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 90, 91, notes the prevalence with which the phrases “upon these grounds” and “upon what grounds?” appear in Wieland. She suggests that the word “grounds” in the novel hovers between its concrete and its abstract significations; it subtly but powerfully links the novel's logical and literal premises.

⁵⁴ In suggesting that Clara is aware of the difficulty of narrating her tale, I do not mean to suggest that she then purposefully chooses rhetorical devices that allow her to overcome or circumvent those difficulties. Rather, I propose that Clara consciously recognizes the limitation she faces as a narrator – namely her inability to assign agency and establish causal relations in her history – but then falls upon her rhetorical “solutions” as she writes.

⁵⁵ Clara voices a (dramatic) disclaimer regarding her emotional investment in her story: “My narrative may be invaded by inaccuracy and confusion … What but ambiguities, abruptness, and dark transitions, can be expected from the historian who is, at the same time, the sufferer of these disasters?” (112).

⁵⁶ For example, Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy, 45, writes, “Along with The Power of Sympathy, works such as Charlotte Temple (1794), The Coquette (1797), “Amelia” (1787), and Wieland (1798) foreground situations wherein the characters’ own emotions or senses lead them astray. Read along the lines of conventional education, these characters suffer the consequences of their own weaknesses; read in the spirit of seductive subversion, they die from the strength of their passions.”

⁵⁷ Although, in the advertisement for Wieland, Brown expresses his intent to illustrate “some important branches of the moral constitution of man” (4), he does not indicate what those branches will be. In fact, Brown does not even guarantee that the novel's didactic purposes will be met: “Whether this tale will be classed with the ordinary or frivolous sources of amusement, or be ranked with the few productions whose usefulness secures to them a lasting reputation, the reader must be permitted to decide” (4).

⁵⁸ Koenigs, Thomas examines the similarities between Clara and Clarissa in particular in “‘Whatever May Be the Merit of My Book as a Fiction’: Wieland's Instructional Fictionality,” English Literary History, 79, 3 (2012), 715–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁹ Ibid., 729.

⁶⁰ Brown, Charles Brockden, “Walstein's School of History: From the German of Krants of Gotha,” Pt. 1, Monthly Magazine and American Review, 1, 5 (Aug. 1799), 335–38Google Scholar, 335.

⁶¹ Ibid., 336.

⁶² Brown, Charles Brockden, “Walstein's School of History: From the German of Krants of Gotha,” Pt. 2, The Monthly Magazine and American Review, 1, 6 (Sept. 1799), 407–11Google Scholar, 411.

⁶³ Ibid., 408.

⁶⁴ Brown writes that Clarissa “died a victim of errors, scarcely less opprobrious and pernicious, than those of her tyrants and oppressors.” Ibid., 411.

⁶⁵ Brown alludes to the secular condition of the “degenerate” modern age when he writes that religion and feudalism's previously “genuine” influence over Europe has been “thwarted, in different degrees, by learning and commerce.” Portugal's moral and political upheaval exemplifies how these interactions have produced “the most extensive and unmingled mischiefs.” Brown, “Walstein's School of History,” Pt. 1, 338.

⁶⁶ Brown, “Walstein's School of History,” Pt. 2, 408.

⁶⁷ Ibid., 408, Brown, “Walstein's School of History,” Pt. 1, 338.

⁶⁸ Brown, “Walstein's School of History,” Pt. 2, 409.

⁶⁹ Brown, “Walstein's School of History,” Pt. 1, 339.

⁷⁰ Ibid., 339, Brown, “Walstein's School of History,” Pt. 2, 408.

⁷¹ Emerson, Amanda, “The Early American Novel: Charles Brockden Brown's Fictitious Historiography,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 40, 1–2 (2007), 125–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 133.